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2 years ago Why Georgism? “He who sees the truth, let him proclaim it, without asking who is for it or who is against it. This is not radicalism in the bad sense which so many attach to the word. This is conservatism in the true sense.” - Henry George "There is danger in reckless change, but greater danger in blind conservatism." http://www.cgocouncil.org/cwho.html https://cgocouncil.org/who-we-are/ The Georgist Movement The Georgist movement is unlike other "advocacy groups" in many interesting ways. Adherents come from across the political spectrum. The Georgist philosophy can be viewed as a fundamental synthesis of the best of "left" and "right": a reconciliation of justice and efficiency in economic relations. Due to the far-reaching implications of this philosophy, activity is pursued on many fronts, including activism in support of local property tax reform, popular education, research, publishing, and community and global networking. Various organizations, groups and periodicals exist to promote Georgist philosophy and/or public re-venue based on land values. These organizations are engaged in various types of programs, most notably: Education in the fundamentals of Georgist philosophy and analysis. Activities to promote public support for land value taxation and the legislation necessary to implement this reform. Research into the role of land in the economy, the techniques of assessment and the suitability of rent as a tax base. Publication and exchange of ideas, to develop alliances, ideas and programs. The Council of Georgist Organizations hosts an annual conference at a selected location in North America. Smaller conferences and events are also held, and the CGO serves as a clearinghouse for information about such events.
Solving Today's Social Problems Poverty and Unemployment -- By discouraging land speculation, public collection of land rent opens up opportunities to labor and capital, creating a renewed demand for labor and raising wages. Fully applied, it can eliminate involuntary unemployment. Urban Problems -- Decent housing is scarce and costly. Many have simply become resigned to the perpetuation of an "urban underclass". And, as bad as urban problems are in the West, they have become far worse in the developing world, where cities lack even the most basic services for poor people. A land value tax shift encourages the improvement of property, making good housing more affordable. Tax Reform -- Citizens today groan under the weight of taxes on wages, property and commerce. People's taxes increase with every effort they make to improve the quality of their lives. The land value tax, on the other hand, is unique in that it does not penalize those who work and produce. Since better public services increase site values, the land value tax shift is a self-financing alternative to oppressive taxation. Urban Sprawl -- By encouraging efficient and appropriate use of land, public collection of land rent eliminates urban blight and rural overdevelopment. The "leap-frog development" that characterizes urban sprawl is replaced by a more efficient development that preserves the clean and green countryside. Energy and Conservation -- The monopoly of natural resources is the root cause of high energy prices, widespread waste and inefficiency of energy use, and possibly irreversible changes in the earth's climate. Acknowledging that all individuals have the right to these resources is the first step toward sustainable energy production and better conservation policies. Inflation -- Many factors contribute to inflation: government waste, deficit spending, monopolistic and speculative rises in the price of land, and over-expansion of the money supply. Most of these problems stem from the unhealthy incentives of today's tax systems. To the degree implemented, the Single Tax would eliminate these causes of inflation. Development and Land Reform -- The world's resources, if used wisely and efficiently, will comfortably and sustainably support all people. Instead, these resources are squandered by a small minority. Georgist reforms would give landless people an opportunity to produce for themselves instead of for a privileged few, ending the hunger and poverty incorrectly ascribed to overpopulation. War and Peace -- The world is in transition. The "Cold War" no longer dominates international politics, but still the social problems remain. World security is disturbed by struggles over territory and natural resources. These problems cannot be solved until we recognize that the Earth belongs to all. The Georgist philosophy offers a practical way to achieve equal access to nature, true free trade, cooperation and peace.
Who Will drive Mankind to freedom? Neither the Right nor the Left can talk about our problems correctly. https://blind-spots.org/2020/06/03/capitalism-is-bad-for-business/ The ethics of land and liberty https://www.progress.org/articles/the-ethics-of-land-and-liberty What justifies the ownership of anything? Ethics, governance, and economics are interrelated and can be unified in one system
The Case for Universal Property https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-case-for-universal-property/ If implemented on a significant scale, universal property would inoculate the society against extreme inequality. It would provide an asset-based source for a universal basic income, not dependent on redistributive taxation. Charging for use of the sky’s carbon-absorption capacity would help stabilize the Earth’s climate by curbing emissions; similarly, financial transaction taxes would help stabilize the economy by curbing hair-trigger speculation Universal property is a bold idea that does not fit neatly into old labels. It is neither Democratic nor Republican, neither liberal nor conservative, neither socialist nor libertarian. Or rather, it is both. It would advance equality and liberty together. And by bringing everyone into the same boat as co-owners, it could help bridge the divides that keep us apart.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180720204459/http://www.urbantoolsconsult.org:80/Tax-Reduction.html States Could Reduce Taxes for Most Taxpayers while Stimulating their Economies Most citizens would be taxed less because their tax reduction will exceed what they’re paying in taxes now. This would be especially true of all non-landowning renters because in the long run the land tax cannot be passed on to them. New construction & renovation would be more profitable because they’d be taxed less. Perhaps tax-exempt these activities (not their land) for the first 7 years. There’d be complete revenue neutrality since a pro-economic tax would only be reducing economically harmful taxes.
23 summaries of empirical studies show that economic development has always followed the exact equivalent of this proposal.
What Georgism Isn't Is this just hating on landlords? Per Dan Sullivan http://savingcommunities.org/docs/churchill.winston/landandincometaxes.html#system There is a fundamental difference between criticizing and vilifying - a difference that is captured in Winston Churchill's statement, "I hope you will understand that when I speak of the land monopolist, I am dealing more with the process than with the individual landowner. I have no wish to hold any class up to public disapprobation. I do not think that the man who makes money by unearned increment in land, is morally a worse man than any one else, who gathers his profit where he finds it, in this hard world under the law and according to common usage. It is not the individual I attack; it is the system. It is not the man who is bad; it is the law which is bad. It is not the man who is blameworthy for doing what the law allows and what other men do; it is the State which would be blameworthy, were it not to endeavour to reform the law and correct the practice. We do not want to punish the landlord. We want to alter the law." This is not merely the difference between criticizing and vilifying; it is the difference between treating public policy as a series of problems to be solved vs. battles to be won, between the politics of reason vs. the politics of power, between the spirit of classical liberalism and enlightenment vs. the spirit of Marxism and post-moderism, between the spirit of love vs. the spirit of hate. Is all this Socialism? Georgist Theory of Value versus Marx (Labor Theory of Value) and Austrian (Subjective) http://www.georgistjournal.org/2012/10/15/why-are-theories-of-value-important/ Marx and Austrians ignore land. http://georgistjournal.org/2012/09/21/the-georgist-view-of-capital-and-interest/ http://www.wealthandwant.com/themes/Is_this_socialism.html Among the first questions people tend to ask when they start to hear about these ideas are whether we are talking about socialism, or even communism. The short answer is "neither — rather, we want capitalism on a level playing field!" This website will lead you to think about what rightly belongs to the individual and what rightly belongs to the community. It provides a simple way to collect for the community what is rightly common property, and to leave to the individual what he created. So, yes, we seek to socialize that which the individual or corporation didn't create, couldn't possibly create, can't create more of — and privatize that which he does make: the fruits of his labor and the results of his saving which aren't in the nature of common property. One of the phrases to describe America's existing economic system is "Land Monopoly Capitalism." [The board game Monopoly was an outgrowth of a turn-of-the-century game called The Landlord's Game, designed to teach these ideas.] What Georgists are proposing is capitalism on a level playing field — something along the line of "Capitalism is a very fine system, and America really ought to try it some time!" Having said all that, it is also fair to say that Progress & Poverty, while explicitly and exuberantly in favor of a purer form of capitalism than is practiced anywhere in the world now, probably played a role in bringing many people in the 19th century, particularly in England, to the socialist movement, including George Bernard Shaw. This page also contains many of Henry George's comments on socialism, few of which are positive. See The Science of Political Economy, toward the end — the organization of a great ship. Henry George debated Social Democrat H. M. Hyndman in London in 1889, and the text of that debate highlights the points of commonality and the very significant differences. In The Wages of Labor, George is extremely critical of the Socialist "solution," making clear why he thinks it both wrong and ineffective. Henry George: The Great Debate: Single Tax vs Social Democracy (1 https://bluerepublik.wordpress.com/2020/04/28/georgism-lvt-faq/ IS THIS ALL JUST MARXISM/COMMUNISM? No, in fact George and Marx exchanged, via letter, terse words. Henry George wanted neither an intermediary state control nor commune control of land; "I do not propose either to purchase or to confiscate private property in land. The first would be unjust; the second, needless. Let the individuals who now hold it still retain, if they want to, possession of what they are pleased to call their land. Let them continue to call it their land. Let them buy and sell, and bequeath and devise it. We may safely leave them the shell, if we take the kernel. It is not necessary to confiscate land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent." – Henry George, Progress and Poverty p. 405 Georgists also have no qualms with private ownership of capital which was created by human toil – it’s merely in nature we draw issue with claims of exclusive ownership. If we were to split the economy up as classical economists such as Smith, Ricardo and Malthus did, we would see: Labor (wages), Capitalists (profits), Landlords (rent). Communism originally wished to do away with all private ownership of the preceding factors, and see a completely stateless (and moneyless) form of living. Socialism meanwhile wished to only maintain personal property via wages, and allow free personal consumption. Georgism has no qualms with private capital or labor rights, but rather question the place of landlords. Capitalism in our current conception wishing for the private ownership of all of the above factors (although many iterations are willing for taxation of the various factors). Notably, some older capitalists and socialists did have more lenient crossover with geoists, and when discussing ideologies as widely interpreted as socialism and capitalism and the ilk, you should rid yourself of all semantic problems and simply ask everyone involved to define their terms before stepping further into the conversation. These are the terms as I have come to understand them over many years of study, and you can take issue with the definitions as you please. http://geolib.com/sullivan.dan/commonrights.html One of the great tragedies of socialism has been the confounding of common rights (natural rights common to each individual) with collective rights (those that have been delegated to the community or its government). Common rights are inalienable, individual rights -- the very opposite of collective rights. Classical liberalism was based on the idea of common rights. https://www.cooperative-individualism.org/kaufman-w-h_karl-marx-and-henry-george-1916.htm Single Taxer from 1916 says George and Marx actually agree and were talking past one another with different definitions. (I don't think this viewpoint is entirely valid for many of the above reasons) Said a better translation for marxist 'Capital' is 'Private Monopoly'
Concepts Created Monday 18 December 2017
Groundwork
The ethics of land and liberty https://www.progress.org/articles/the-ethics-of-land-and-liberty
A colonists' plea for Land nationalization http://www.wealthandwant.com/docs/ajo_slavery.html Why landlordism is akin to slavery. What is Economic Value and who creates it? Mariana Mazzucato https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXrCeiQxWyc&fbclid
How Land Works
What is Economic Value and who creates it? Mariana Mazzucato https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXrCeiQxWyc The private appropriation of publicly generated land rent is a de-facto tax. It's a "redistribution of wealth" from those who produce to those who don't. It is, in short, "welfare" for landlords. The Economics of Real Estate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4o9aPFI3I0 1.) Properly separates value of housing as made up of land (which appreciates) and improvements (which depreciate) as distinct values. 2.) Inflation of consumer goods is driven by inflation of commercial rents 3.) Rents increasing even though wages falling thanks to nonsensical and self referential lending for speculation in land. 4.) Directly states that moving around land titles doesn't actually produce any wealth and drains investment from productive enterprise.
Land unlike Capital and Labor is not a rivalrous good. https://i.imgur.com/5NPgRzB.png Economic Capitalization - Public goods are capitalized into land values. https://www.progress.org/articles/economic-capitalization The Housing Theory of Everything https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/ The hidden effects of expensive housing impacts everything. Productivity - Workers are more productive in more productive places. Restricting housing in these areas lowers overall productivity by preventing them from moving to where their skills can be put to best use. Innovation - Proximity of complimentary workers and unplanned interaction leads to innovation. The most innovative areas are among the most expensive. Inequality - The aggregate, countrywide effect of housing being so limited in supply has been that economic growth in most Western countries has accrued more and more to landowners and less to everyone else. Left-behind areas and regional inequality - Consider a cleaner living in Alabama. In 1960 they could move to NYC and earn wages 84% higher, and still end up with 70% higher income after rent. In 2010, they could move to New York City and become 28% more productive, and earn a wage 28% higher – and reduce the surplus of workers back home, letting them demand higher pay. But since housing costs are so much higher, the net earnings and living standards of someone like this would fall if they moved today, and wouldn’t be worth it. Families - The price of housing does not just affect the places where people live; it determines the kinds of homes they live in as well. And that has a huge influence on people’s family lives, affecting both when people have kids and how many kids they have. Obesity - preferring sprawl over density, and the housing shortages that kind of policy creates, may be damaging health, equality, average wealth and the number of children we have. Climate change - If walkable cities ban new homes, their residents will move to more affordable places like Atlanta which build larger, more carbon-hungry homes, drive more and emit far more carbon than they would if they had the freedom to live where many of them really wanted to.
The Problem of land
The problem of Land Ownership. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNDzwUOQUjQ
The ethics of land and liberty https://www.progress.org/articles/the-ethics-of-land-and-liberty What justifies the ownership of anything? How Land disappeared from Economic Theory https://evonomics.com/josh-ryan-collins-land-economic-theory/ The classical political economists – David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith – that shaped the birth of modern economics, emphasized that land had unique qualities, distinct from capital and labour, that had important influence on the dynamics of production. The classical economists were ‘political’ in the sense that they saw a key role for the state and in particular taxation in preventing the institution of private property from constraining economic development via rent. But at the turn of the nineteenth century, a group of economists began to develop a new kind of economics, based upon universal scientific laws of supply and demand and free of normative judgements concerning power and state intervention. Land’s uniqueness as an input to production was lost along the way.
How Economics has become twisted How Euphemisms Have Turned Economics from a Science to a Propaganda Device http://savingcommunities.org/econ/orwellian.html SEe also : "Corruption of Economics" and "Neoclassical Economics as strategem against Henry George"
The difference betwixt rights and privileges. http://savingcommunities.org/internal/mudbackmon/102rightsvsprivileges.html
Indirect consequences Political Capitalism https://blog.independent.org/2018/08/03/political-capitalism/ Lays out a theoretical foundation for understanding why cronyism and corruption are becoming increasingly common in capitalist economies. Political capitalism is displacing market capitalism. Complexity of Government enriches few and imposes costs on society https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/kludgeocracy-in-america
Documentaries http://realestate4ransom.com/film/ Owned - https://www.ownedfilm.com/watch-now Watch on Amazon? Fits with Traumatized society. Shame of Chicago http://www.shameofchicago.org/episodes#episode01 (Watch online?) https://www.chicagoreporter.com/the-plunder-of-black-wealth-in-chicago-captured-in-film/ Segregated by Design - www.segregatedbydesign.com (Basically 'The Color of Law' in short film form!) Divided - a Documentary on Chicago’s Segregation https://www.kzoo.edu/praxis/chicagos-segregation/ (On Youtube?) Banished - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLhZqvQccB4
What is Georgism?
Core of Georgist Argument - Max Hirsch http://www.cooperative-individualism.org/hirsch-max_democracy-versus-socialism-1901-part-3-06.pdf Georgist Theory of Value vs Marx (Labor Theory of Value) and Austrian (Subjective Value) http://www.georgistjournal.org/2012/10/15/why-are-theories-of-value-important/ Collection of all the Articles giving introduction, plus some I didn't know! https://schalkenbach.org/introductionto-the-ideas-ofhenry-george/
History of Georgist ideology and parties around the world. For more: +History https://www.progress.org/articles/five-stages-of-the-georgist-movement https://www.sealionpress.co.uk/blog/other-ideologies-ii-georgism
What we tax and why is very important Canons of Taxation http://www.savingcommunities.org/issues/taxes/ What Do You Know About Taxes? Wrong! https://schalkenbach.org/what-do-you-know-about-taxes-wrong/ Everything We do with tax is wrong. https://unherd.com/2019/11/everything-we-do-with-tax-is-wrong/ Public Revenue Without Taxation https://www.landandliberty.net/public-revenue-without-taxation/ Explains the negative Effects of other taxes. It's time to overhaul Tax for the 21st Century https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/08/09/overhaul-tax-for-the-21st-century?fsrc=scn/fb/te/bl/ed/overhaultaxforthe21stcenturystuckinthepast Today’s tax systems are unforgivably cack-handed Why Economists love but you hate Property tax. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-11-28/why-economists-love-property-taxes-and-you-don-t Nice Charts Quotes adam smith. Very good. Why Sales taxes and VAT are bad m'kay. https://landresearchtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/DebtDeathDeadweight.Ch2_..pdf http://www.masongaffney.org/essays/Europes_Fatal_Affair_with_VAT_Harrison_2016.pdf http://www.masongaffney.org/essays/The_Sales_Tax--History_of_a_Dumb_Idea_3_2005.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/research/dont-buy-the-sales-tax/ Fred Harrison: Taxed to Death https://landresearchtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/taxed.to_.death_.pdf Pamphlet goes over everything moral and economic. To Fix what's wrong See also the book by Lindy Davies 'To Fix what's wrong'
Robert Gourlay (1778-1863) "I am fully convinced, were £200,000 or £300,000 raised annually by (vacant-land) taxation ... and thrown into Lake Ontario, it would tend to good."
Henry George's Remedy What's so special about Henry George? https://schalkenbach.org/whats-so-special-about-henry-george-anyway/ Long article laying the philosophical and economic ground work. http://www.wealthandwant.com/docs/CarterW_intro.html The Importance of Land Land vs. Products: Their Differences Speculation The Incidence of Taxation Taxes: Their Effects on Production The Ethics of Property The Ethics of Taxation The Single Tax Some Implications of the Single Tax HGSS 12 minute video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thOyk_FrvMQ&feature=youtu.be
Funding government from Rents is the first necessary step to fixing society's problems. https://doc-research.org/de/2019/03/income-security-quest-dignity-unequal-world/ Effective remedial action involves the restructuring of government revenue so that people are not penalised for working, saving and investing. By drawing revenue from socially-created rents, governments would liberate their citizens to engage in fulfilling forms of employment and life-styles. To achieve the best outcomes, the first step is for scholars to redesign their theoretical models to include the deadweight losses inflicted by governments on the market economy. This would provide the information necessary for people to mandate governments to undertake the necessary structural changes to the financial system
Moral Case for LVT to fund Government http://markwadsworth.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-moral-case-for-funding-public.html The Least Bad Tax https://blog.mdunn.io/michael/the-least-bad-tax https://web.archive.org/web/20210507045832/https://blog.mdunn.io/michael/the-least-bad-tax Many American's might simply state: “Land Value Tax is close enough to property tax, and I already pay too much. We need less taxes!” However, it would be a mistake to not explore and understand the subtle differences in the two tax policies, as they have quite different economic implications. As with the review of any tax policy, one must understand the economic impact, unless you want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. Taxing Economic Rent (Starting with Land) is Efficient and Progressive. https://promarket.org/reducing-wealth-inequality-through-wealth-taxes-without-compromising-economic-growth/ Strong Citations. An alternative way of slowing down or reversing the trend in wealth inequality would be to tax the returns to wealth directly, instead of taxing wages. However, traditional economic analysis has pointed out two important arguments why taxing wealth is not a good idea. First, if wealth is understood to be productive capital, such as machines, houses, etc., then taxing its returns is particularly inefficient. It reduces growth more strongly than other taxes would because it reduces incentives to invest in productive capital. Second, even if capital taxes are introduced only for the purpose of redistribution, they might not achieve that objective either. This has to do with who ultimately bears the burden of the tax. The rich might be able to pass on to the poor the cost of increased capital taxes by shifting that cost onto wages (Stiglitz, 2016).
Land can be Taxed. It Should be https://voxeu.org/article/land-back-it-should-be-taxed-it-can-be-taxed#.YFDJMOmQc-o.twitter These findings have a strong impact on the way wealth tax, and optimal tax more generally, should be designed. Further, since the optimal taxation literature is becoming increasingly quantitative, land and housing should be reinstated in it, especially when its conclusions apply to countries where housing wealth is between two to four times as large as GDP, as opposed to roughly the same size after WWII (Figure 1). We do precisely this in a recent paper (Bonnet et al. 2021), revisiting Judd's (1885) standard setup. The take-away message is that a wealth tax uniformly taxing all three kinds of wealth – land, structures, and capital – at the same rate is not recommended, as it does not exploit the tax-elasticity heterogeneity of different types of wealth. Progressivity is welcome (Landais et al. 2020), but targeted taxes on the considerable housing wealth, while not trivial to implement, lead to very large welfare gains because housing land is almost a fixed factor, and this should be central to any analysis.
What actually happened when land was taxed? See much more: +History
Land Value Taxation In practice Has the details on all the different parts of the world. (Not just Denmark) http://www.cooperative-individualism.org/hirsch-max_land-values-taxation-in-practice-1908.htm http://www.cooperative-individualism.org/hirsch-max_land-values-taxation-in-practice-1908-denmark.pdf The Tax we Need https://web.archive.org/web/20140110201802/http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/chandler-tertius_tax-we-need-1980-01.html Split tax in Pennsylvania And specifically: +History:Pennsylvania Pittsburgh http://fleeingvesuvius.org/2011/06/02/why-pittsburgh-real-estate-never-crashes-the-tax-reform-that-stabilised-a-city%E2%80%99s-economy/ http://savingcommunities.org/places/us/pa/al/pgh/nevercrashes.html Before introducing split rate tax in 1913 Pittsburgh had the 2nd most expensive housing in the country after New York. Even though at the time, Pittsburgh was very dirty/polluted. Known as 'Coal City' and became the most affordable city in the Country. Land prices only rose 14% in Pittsburgh during the 12 years after the graded tax was adopted in 1913, while they boomed in the rest of the nation.[22] Real-estate interests complained that LVT was robbing Pittsburgh landowners of gains enjoyed elsewhere. However, Mayor Magee saw these gains as speculative, and stood by his actions. Magee was proved correct. National land prices peaked in 1925 and plummeted with the Great Depression, except in Pittsburgh. Despite the great flood of 1936, Pittsburgh's land prices fell only 11% between 1930 and 1940, compared to 58% in Detroit, 50% in Los Angeles, 46% in Cleveland, 28% in Boston, 27% in New Orleans, 26% in Cincinnati, 25% in Milwaukee and 21% in New York. Land prices in Pittsburgh even fell less than in Washington, D.C., where the New Deal was booming.[24]
Pittsburgh did not experience the 2008 mortgage crisis. https://twitter.com/geoliberal/status/768588171634286592 Treba Harrisburg https://www.labourland.org/downloads/papers/chapters/3.pdf https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/3/6/non-glamorous-gains-the-pennsylvania-land-tax-experiment In 1982, Harrisburg instituted a tax rate on land that was four times the rate on buildings. By 1994, the mayor, Stephen Reed, wrote the following in a letter to Allentown, PA civic activists: With over 90% of the property owners in the City of Harrisburg, the two-tiered tax rate system actually saves money over what would otherwise be a single tax system that is currently in use nearly all municipalities in Pennsylvania. We therefore continue to regard the two-tiered tax rate system as an important ingredient in our overall economic development activities. I should note that the City of Harrisburg was considered the second most distressed in the United States twelve years ago under the Federal distress criteria. Since then, over $1.2 billion new investment has occurred here, reversing nearly three decades of very serious previous decline. None of this happened by accident and a variety of economic development initiatives and policies were created and utilized. The two-rate system has been and continues to be one of the key local policies that has been factored into this initial economic success here. The number of vacant structures in Harrisburg declined from over 4200 in 1982 to under 500 by 2001. The downtown—previously a ghost town—is alive, even at night. The number of businesses on the tax roll has grown from 1,908 to 8,864.
What happens when land is not taxed?
http://www.wealthandwant.com/themes/Prop13.html Housing prices have soared as a direct result. https://academic.oup.com/afraf/article/116/465/549/3868619 In contrast to Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore, Rwanda and Ethiopia have failed to recapture land value so investment goes to urban land space and productive investment is starved.
Alternate methods of sharing or capturing rent
Community Land Trusts are a private way to fight speculation and rent privatization. +LandTrusts
Value Capture https://www.manhattan-institute.org/building-fiscal-constraint-nyc-transit-projects https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3466847 Financing the Future | Anthony Flint | TEDxBeaconStreet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvjQbhhPY_E Value Capture It is cheaper to live in madrid and commute by air to london than it is to live in London Even Romans used value capture
Why Rent Control is not the right answer. https://www.progress.org/articles/rent-control-a-case-study https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-16/too-much-rent-control-is-asking-for-trouble https://web.archive.org/web/20191212120807/https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-16/too-much-rent-control-is-asking-for-trouble The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco∗ https://web.archive.org/web/20200104023508/https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/DMQ.pdf Add Gaffney on rent control article here
Explain Land Tax
An Introduction to Land Value Tax https://jacobmkeegan.medium.com/an-introduction-to-land-value-taxes-b51803bacb73 Understanding Land Value Tax https://www.ethicaleconomics.org.uk/2018/12/understanding-land-value-taxation/
From Henry Law http://www.landvaluetax.org/what-is-lvt/ Land (unlike goods and services) has no cost of production. If an ample supply of land of equal desirability were available everywhere, there would be nothing to pay for its use. In reality land acquires a scarcity value owing to the competing needs of the community for living, working and leisure space. Thus land value owes nothing to individual effort and everything to the community at large. It belongs justly and uniquely to the community. Conversely, the reward for individual effort can belong only to the one who earns it, to spend, save or give away as he or she may see fit. Because of differences in positional advantages, fertility or natural resources, some locations are more desirable than others. Demand for access to these features gives land its rental value. Land Value Taxation, being assessed on these values, is fair in its incidence. See more here: http://www.landvaluetax.org/land-value-tax/what-is-lvt-at-length.html http://www.landvaluetax.org/land-value-tax/additional-arguments-in-favour-of-lvt.html
Center for Property Tax Reform https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dIHR3VRk3s Intro to Land Value Tax
Georgism 101 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li_MGFRNqOE Dominic Frisby - Simple Guide to LVT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD_dZvPwAj0 Two minute version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_W7qwtYaL0 Root Bug - Land https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwlvEKxbdVo Stephen Meintjes Short Interviews (South African) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAupS_nJsc0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQlf5TLk29E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6JxmdjYK0A
The case for Land Value tax http://bournbrookmag.com/2019/01/23/land-value-tax/ https://www.bournbrookmag.com/home/the-case-for-land-value-tax?rq=land%20value%20tax By implementing LVT and imposing a tax on landowners which they cannot easily pass onto buyers, we would be witnessing a truly fair and progressive tax in action.
http://www.credoeconomics.com/georgist-macro-economics-and-the-land-value-tax/ The ideas of Henry George are still very relevant for economic theory. A site value tax would help to stabilise property market cycles and promote greater spatial efficiency.
Get to the points. http://savingcommunities.org/issues/taxes/landvalue/
https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/united-states/article/2169147/how-china-can-tax-its-way-out-housing-bubble Why is a tax on land value an antidote to a housing bubble? Well, quite simply, taxing land at a high enough rate removes the incentive for speculators to generate the bubble in the first place. Taxing land and not capital (which seems the popular response to housing issues worldwide at the moment) is important for two reasons. First, land, unlike capital, cannot be hidden in tax havens or by fancy accounting. A land tax is both easier to administer and to pay. Second, a land tax recognises the ubiquitous importance of land to the economy and frees capital from economically harmful taxes. Taxing land promotes more efficient use because it becomes costly to leave land idle. Efficient land use is not only beneficial to economic growth and housing prices, but may also lower the costs of public infrastructure – it would help China avoid the kind of white elephant projects it has become increasingly known for.
Parade of Introductory Articles
Breadtube vs Economics https://youtu.be/-vfx1kQlmOk Introduce LVT from a non Georgist, with lots of Research citations https://www.rethinkeconomics.org/journal/its-the-land-stupid/ The Obscure Economist Sillicon Valley Billionaires Should Dump Ayn Rand for. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/09/the-obscure-economist-henry-george-ayn-rand A Tax you will Love https://exponentsmag.org/2019/08/30/a-tax-you-will-love/ A Land Value Tax Fosters Stronger Communities https://erraticus.co/2020/01/10/land-value-tax-stronger-communities-georgism-development/?fbclid=IwAR1h7WDoVqdjFhk5Z2UAgvW4_sZQSYcK_e5M8atwRR3jEAP0PZeqi26yH4s The Most Socially Just Tax https://www.progress.org/articles/the-most-socially-just-tax The 140-Year-Old Dream of ‘Government Without Taxation’ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2019/04/henry-georges-single-tax-could-combat-inequality/587197/ Actually sets out the situation very well, but relies on critics who think there isn't enough rent to fund federal government. The Ultimate Tax Reform:Public Revenue from Land Rent http://www.foldvary.net/works/policystudy.pdf How LVT prevents the 'Tragedy of the commons' http://markwadsworth.blogspot.com/2016/06/laffer-curve-of-planning.html How to fight inequality https://www.architectmagazine.com/practice/how-to-fight-wealth-inequality_o Details history of Arden and how it worked out in practice. The Fair System to replace other taxes and FAQs https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2016/01/18/the-fair-system-to-replace-council-tax-annual-ground-rent-agr/ Scottish starting point but he also details point by point why it benefits everyone and goes over History. Very good article, calls LVT "Annual Ground Rent"
Deep Dives See also: +Research +Research:Data
Long form version: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/02/henry-georges-land-value-tax-idea-whose-time-come/ A Tax to Solve the Housing Crisis https://thetyee.ca/Solutions/2018/06/04/Tax-To-Solve-Housing-Crisis/ This article comes from a Vancouver Standpoint, but it actually summarizes Georgism and why modern economics ignores it very well. https://thetyee.ca/Solutions/2018/06/06/Vienna-Housing-Affordability-Case-Cracked/ What happens when you de-commodify land? Viennese public housing supplied very successfully after speculators driven from land market. Vienna provides an interesting counterpoint. Because rent control disincentivized the private development of rental buildings, landlords were, for a time, removed from the market for urban land. Consequently prices finally went down, allowing the city to buy land at a much reduced price; often it was the only buyer in the market. Even though the city was able to keep land prices down, land and housing still cost money. In the late 1920s, about 30 per cent of Vienna’s annual budget was spent buying land and financing housing construction. Where did that money come from? Mostly from taxes on private property and land. They were levied on private apartment buildings and progressively increased with the assessed value of each unit. Very high taxes were also levied on vacant land, giving owners extra incentive to sell. These policies stripped land speculation out of the marketplace and did so very rapidly. Rents in Vienna are a quarter that of similar units in Paris. Sightline institute Series on Land Taxes - Sightline Institute should revisit! (Write an open letter) https://www.sightline.org/series/love-for-land-value-taxes/ https://www.sightline.org/2014/06/10/to-revitalize-downtowns-tax-land-speculation/ 1.) Land-value taxation discourages speculation and encourages development of high-value properties. 2.) Land-value taxation is more economically efficient than most taxes. 3.) Land-value taxation is more progressive than other taxes 4.) Land-value taxation is fairer than many other taxes. 5.) Land-value taxation revenue is adequate and stable.
Property Taxes, Affordability, Monopoly Power, Rents and Efficiency - Lots of Research and Charts. Check author's book as well. https://www.mercatus.org/publications/monetary-policy/shut-out https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/property-taxes-are-rent-public-landlord (Mentions Henry George) In the previous essay of this series, I used this basic accounting identity to think about how rent, price, and rate of return to investors are related. Net Rental Value after maintenance and expenses = Rate of return on investment × Price
https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/property-taxes-can-be-tax-monopoly-power The answer depends on what the rent is paying for. In 2014, Byron Lutz, an economist with the Federal Reserve, studied a change in property taxes in New Hampshire. He found that where building was not politically constrained, lower taxes led to more building. Where building was politically constrained, in urban areas with zoning restrictions, lower taxes led to higher prices rather than more building. we should consider why property taxes don’t change rents or quantities in constrained urban centers. Rents in constrained urban markets are the product of a political cartel. Owners in those cities are collecting unearned profits from monopoly power by using local municipal bureaucracies to prevent new units from being built. The fact that the renter does not pay the tax in those areas is a good thing. That means the monopolist owner is paying the tax. If politically maintained monopoly power is going to remain, claiming monopolist profits through taxes is an improvement. The fact that the tax doesn’t affect rents is a sign of efficiency. If rents must be elevated, better that they go to local public services than to the real estate cartel. Ideally, those public revenues could be used to fund local infrastructure that would allow local populations to increase with fewer added stresses or congestion. Where home prices have become extremely high, there is a tremendous opportunity to fund public infrastructure with taxes on monopolist rents. https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/low-property-taxes-and-obstructed-housing-supply-are-bad-mix Where housing is politically constrained so that property values are inflated, property taxes can be a relatively pure claim of monopoly profits. So, one could argue that a beneficial policy goal may be to raise property taxes in cities where property values are high. Using this simple equation, price can be expressed as a function of rental value and rate of return. Further, rate of return can be broken out into several components: the market rate of return required for assets with similar risks, the expected future growth rate of rent on a unit, and the rate of property tax.
Market Rate of Return – Expected Growth in Rent + Property Tax = ( Net Rental Value / Price ) (Expected rent growth is subtracted from the rate of return because the cash return an investor requires is lower if the investment value is expected to grow. In other words, an investment with a face value of $1 and a dividend of 5 percent that is reinvested is the same as an investment with a starting face value of $1 that increases in value by 5 percent per year with no dividend.) There are some cities where prices have become exceedingly high. Before the crisis, this was widely blamed on speculative, unsustainable markets. In my book Shut Out, I noted that, to the contrary, high home prices have been highly correlated with high rents. Prices hadn’t become unmoored from rents. They were high because of high rents. Confusion on this matter comes from the fact that when rents rise in a city, prices tend to rise even more. Figure 1 compares rents and prices among the largest metropolitan areas. The relationship between rent and price is extremely strong. Figure 2 shows how, over the last twenty years, higher rents have become increasingly associated with higher price/rent ratios. This is because the shortage of urban housing has created localized rent inflation that is expected to continue into the future. Before urban housing became so difficult to build, rents didn’t just keep rising in economically successful cities. Rents remained moderate as people moved to successful places and homes were built for them. Prices didn’t rise in expectation of future rising rents. The pattern of cities with persistently rising rents and prices that reflect future high rents has only developed recently. In Atlanta, a new leveraged home buyer has similar total monthly costs as a home buyer in Dallas, but in Dallas, more of those costs flow to the local government instead of to the mortgage lender. Since the property tax can be described as a sort of silent ownership by the government instead by the homeowner, the value of those tax payments to the government is not part of the market value of the home. If we added the value the home has for both the owner and the government, homes in Atlanta and Dallas would have a similar total value. Henry George's Single Tax Could Combat Inequality https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2019/04/henry-georges-single-tax-could-combat-inequality/587197/ Has great collections of links, but doesn't rebutt the argument that there isn't enough money. If you share this, add the other estimations from other souces Visualization
https://www.io-a.com/case-land-value-tax/ Visual Chart Visualize the Math interactively! https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/a68pdr/geogebra_interactives/ Land Value Tax Calculator Idle Land, Unemployed Workers Caused by Incorrect Taxation Land Value Tax Revenues Relative to Rent and Land Value Distribution of wealth between factors of production (See how Rent increases with Productivity) https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/lkidke/graphs_about_taxation_with_margin_of_production/ Visualize Earthsharing (LVT) http://earthsharing.org/visualizing-earth-sharing/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190306034814/http://earthsharing.org/visualizing-earth-sharing/
A high land value tax, uniformly applied, can gradually reverse sprawl, putting vacant and underused land to its highest and best use. There are many other positive social, environmental, and economic effects of land value taxation. However, many of these other positive effects can only be understood by first understanding the spatial effects.
Strong Towns Strong Towns 6 minute video https://www.strongtowns.org/landtax Content portal Strong Towns Land Speculator video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqQhoZgFZgk Relationship between Urban Space, productivity, and tax incentives. (Doesn't acutally address LVT directly, but nice short explanation of'Doing The Math' see also the Strong Towns article on tax per acre) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVD01WUm0oA&feature=youtu.be Why traditional development and efficient use of Land is much preferable to suburban experiment/wasteful land speculator use. https://youtu.be/AGxni1c-klM Strong Towns LVT ebook. https://www.strongtowns.org/lvt-ebook Strong Towns Podcast on LVT https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-kkuhg-b05bdd Has an interesting idea at getting the same effects by for example charging for roads as a utility. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/2/27/anchorage-held-hostage Strong Towns Podcast about Parking, but actually mostly about how LVT aligns incentives of a city with economic reality. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/1/26/parkings-free-ride
Stealth Georgism https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/2/20/financing-infrastructure5-with-value-capture-the-good-the-bad-the-ugly But it explains it all very well!
The Economist Why Henry George had a point from the Economist https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2015/04/01/why-henry-george-had-a-point Misuse of Urban Space is crippling. https://www.economist.com/leaders/2015/04/04/space-and-the-city Land has returned as a constraint on growth https://www.economist.com/briefing/2015/04/04/the-paradox-of-soil The Time may be right for Land Value tax https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/08/09/the-time-may-be-right-for-land-value-taxes Spends too much time naysaying. Dont share without supporting material. It's time to overhaul Tax for the 21st Century https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/08/09/overhaul-tax-for-the-21st-century?fsrc=scn/fb/te/bl/ed/overhaultaxforthe21stcenturystuckinthepast Today’s tax systems are unforgivably cack-handed
Affordability
Why is Rent so High? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HZANYxnkWk How to end Poverty? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itO7OoKtNUc
Why you can't afford to buy a house and how to fix it | Laurie Macfarlane | TEDxTotnes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI4trJE8atI&t=1s 16th century English Land Enclosure lead to capitalism, democracy, modern world.
Want affordable Housing? Look to the land! http://solidgroundcampaign.org/blog/want-affordable-housing-look-land Explains many of the benefits inherent to the system.
A better way to solve the housing crisis — tax land, not development https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-manville-monkonnen-linkage-fee-20170719-story.html
China could avoid housing bubbles if it looked to Sun Yatsen or Singapore https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/united-states/article/2169147/how-china-can-tax-its-way-out-housing-bubble
Stop blaming immigrants for the housing crisis https://medium.com/@t.keating3/stop-blaming-immigrants-for-the-housing-crisis-8a3189181394 So what is the real reason for impossible house prices? The answer is underneath our feet. Land. In fact 90% of the variation in House price/Earnings ratio can be explained by a least-squares regression of this ratio on UK household land value! I’ve included 95% prediction intervals. LVT captures the economic gains from investment in a location that are not due to the landowner’s own effort. Currently this unearned wealth gain is factored into the market value of all land and property when it is sold. With LVT, all land becomes relatively cheaper because this source of unearned wealth, known as economic rent, is removed.
Growth See also +History:Pennsylvania
Faster Growth Begins With a Land Tax in U.S. Cities https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-10-24/faster-growth-begins-with-a-land-tax-in-u-s-cities The case for taxing land https://web.archive.org/web/20070814040319/http://www.newstatesman.com/200409200007 What happens when we remove tax on buildings but not land? https://www.phillymag.com/property/2017/04/10/tax-abatement-huge-shot-in-arm-for-city-study-finds/ (Philadelphia tax abatement on improvements) Previously, Philadelphia imposed a ruinous local income tax, which over the decades was shown to be one of the core reasons Philadelphia lost 25% of its population. Philadelphia also imposes a special cigarette tax and a tax on sugary drinks both of which fit the definition of "social engineering." New York from http://www.americaisnotbroke.net/p/the-slideshow.html Governor Al Smith of New York got the state legislature to allow NYC to tax land but not buildings for 10 years and new construction tripled.
More and cheaper housing, higher wages for construction workers, more businesses to sell to them Law expired in 1931 but NYC kept growing, despite beginning the decade with higher density than other cities and without growing its boundaries. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/what-it-actually-costs-to-maintain-an-older-house/ In 2017, Akron Mayor Dan Horrigan created a 15-year, 100 percent, citywide property tax abatement program. I am proud to say that it is attracting new residents, investors, and home builders to Akron. In 2015, only 10 houses were built in our entire city. Today, there are over 1,000 housing units in some stage of development. Why dont more cities use the split rate tax? https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/cities-split-rate-property-taxes-value-capture-land-value-Innovation-lab Explains how it works. Why Minneapolis (and every other city) Needs a land value tax https://streets.mn/2020/08/28/why-minneapolis-needs-a-land-value-tax/
Assessments
Assessments of property taxes rob from the poor and give to the rich. https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/voices.uchicago.edu/dist/6/2330/files/2019/04/Berry-Reassessing-the-Property-Tax-3121.pdf https://www.jstor.org/stable/27891010?seq=1 https://www.propublica.org/series/the-tax-divide https://www.arnoldventures.org/stories/property-taxes-rob-from-the-poor-give-breaks-to-the-rich/ Berry found that between 2011 and 2015, Cook County, which includes Chicago, shifted $2.2 billion worth of the property tax burden from properties that were undervalued to those that were overvalued. A lot of that came right off the top. He estimated that roughly $800 million was shifted from the top 10 percent of properties, by actual value, to the bottom 90 percent. After Detroit began its first citywide reappraisal in six decades, Berry found that, while average assessments had gone down, most properties in the bottom third in terms of sales price were being assessed well above limits set by the Michigan constitution. See also Washington post story on Racial Inequalities https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/03/12/property-tax-regressive/?outputType=amp A recent study of 118 million homes nationwide found that Black and Hispanic homeowners pay 10 to 13 percent more in property taxes than whites who own similar properties. “One of the big issues is that the law should be applied to everyone the same, But we can make it better: Solving the assessment problem is one way to fix regressivity, but beyond that there are several things that could make property taxes not only more fair but progressive. For one thing, people in less expensive homes could be charged lower rates, just as income tax rates are often based on income levels. Many jurisdictions already give property tax breaks to seniors and farmers. They could choose to offer more breaks to more people. They could also make discounts that are already on the books automatic. For instance, most states have homestead exemptions that make roughly the first $8,000 or $10,000 worth of value tax-free, but not everyone knows to apply for that exemption. Finally, one major reason people in more expensive homes pay less is that they’re more likely to appeal their assessments. Right now, there’s little downside and the owner has a strong incentive to appeal. By appealing the assessment, the owner might get it lowered, but even if the appeal is denied, they’re not going to end up paying more. Finding ways to change the appeals incentives might stop people from assuming they’ll come out ahead, Murphy suggests. Once people are aware of the discrepancies, they don’t approve of them, even if they benefit. Berry’s work in Chicago underpinned a series of stories from the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica that became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. More importantly, the stories helped convince Cook County voters they needed to change assessors. “The wealthiest parts of the city, which were going to have to pay more in taxes, voted, if anything, even more for the reformer,” Berry said. “No one wants to pay taxes, but I don’t think affluent people want to feel like the poor are paying their taxes for them.” A LVT would be even better. Assessing is not the largest problem. Denmark used to asses urban locations with panels of local citizens. (It was changed b/c CAM was cheaper.) from Fred Harrison: The Traumatized Society ch: Between Eden and Nod https://www.labourland.org/downloads/papers/chapters/4.pdf In short, it is not true that valuing land is problematic, as opponents or sceptics of land value taxation often assert – often the same people who quite happily accept the valuation of buildings, even though this is more difficult. Valuing land, especially in towns, which is where the most valuable land is located (because it is in high demand) is much simpler, because, as discussed, it depends essentially on location. Indeed, in the United States where split-rate tax systems operate, according to a valuer in one city, some 95 per cent of his valuation staff is employed valuing buildings, whilst only 5 per cent is involved in valuing land. Moreover, invariably, there are many more appeals against the valuation of buildings than of land, with authorities winning more appeals on land than on buildings. https://www.landvaluetax.org/download-document/126-glasgow-city-council-local-taxation-working-group-overall-findings.html https://www.landvaluetax.org/download-document/125-glasgow-city-council-critique-by-david-mills.html https://www.valuergeneral.nsw.gov.au/land_values/how_do_we_value_land/quality_assurance
A new way to precisely assess real estate values. https://pages.jh.edu/jrer/papers/pdf/forth/accepted/Property price separation between land and building components_update.pdf Observed sales prices are direct references for the market value of properties, but they do not provide information about the separate valuesoflandand building. There are different theories and methods, each one being limited in practice. This paper presents thetroublesome issueof price separation and proposes apractical alternative, using detailed data from Montreal (Canada). The empirical results support the separability thesis in practice for the cases of residential properties. Gwartney on Estimating Land Value http://www.wealthandwant.com/docs/Gwartney_Estimating_LV.html http://www.henrygeorge.org/ted.htm?fbclid=IwAR3QYz5noD7QkT2LSqisBOp_ZNhvh09EgClPgwrL5oXEAoq-XbUX0_1VxyA FAQ
Mason Gaffney's Answer to Futilitarians http://www.masongaffney.org/essays/Answer_to_Futilitarians_1998.pdf Points Made in The Corruption of Economics Geofiscalism composes common rights in land with private tenure of land, and free markets. Geofiscalism untaxes labor without raising taxes on capital, or capital formation. Geofiscalism composes equity with efficiency. Local and regional (state, provincial) governments can pay for public services as generously as they please while simultaneously attracting industry, capital and population by untaxing them. Geofiscalism contains urban sprawl without denying consumers free choice of location Geofiscalism creates jobs without use of inflationary demand stimulus. Geofiscalism lets a polity attract people without diluting its resource base. We may label this the “Hong Kong Effect,” although it is observable in most thriving cities. Geofiscalism makes jobs while abating demands on nature and the environment. This is a byproduct of containing urban sprawl (cf. #5, #9), and the Hong Kong Effect (#7). Geofiscalism promotes economy in government. New Points Geofiscalism lets us raise tax rates without impairing the tax base: there is no “Laffer-curve Effect.” Geofiscalism effects a radical social and economic reform in a completely non-catastrophic way, working silently through existing institutions and the free market. Geofiscalism may be and has been applied by local, central, and intermediate levels of government. Geofiscalism may be and has been applied in whole or in part. It is compatible with a mixed economy. It may be applied immediately, or phased in slowly, as preferred. Geofiscalism is impervious to tax-avoidance and evasion schemes: foreign tax havens, tax shelters, profit shifting, concealment, electronic transfers, smuggling, creative accounting, etc. Geofiscal levies are enforceable without tracing persons, and without threatening them with jail or other personal penalties. The land is the hostage. Geofiscalism democratizes access to land, in the manner of open access to a commons, yet without relaxing the constraint on economic use. Geofiscalism has the effect of extending land credit to the poor, and everyone, with no risk of non-repayment. Geofiscalism speeds the renewal of sites now occupied or covered by decayed and/or obsolete machinery, equipment and buildings. It does so without subsidies, either direct ones to new equipment or indirect ones like sacrificing tax revenues Geofiscalism raises revenue without any complex machinery and paperwork such as bedevil the income taxes (corporate and personal), and without any confidentiality of tax data from the press and the public
LVT FAQ and response to objections https://bluerepublik.wordpress.com/2020/04/28/georgism-lvt-faq/ In response to a Land Value Tax, Landlords will serve to maximize their own best interests, and absorb the entirety of the tax, meaning no deadweight loss occurs, and renters have no tax burden to worry about. http://markwadsworth.blogspot.com/2016/12/causation-is-not-creation_28.html?_sm_au_=iVV6QFrV3Nqk7VMN (Response to spillover effects) https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/amzc6n/wouldnt_a_land_value_tax_just_result_in_increased/ https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/an7nqq/a_response_to_georgism/ http://kaalvtn.blogspot.co.uk/p/index.html http://www.landvaluetax.org/frequently-asked-questions/ https://www.landvaluetax.org/faqs-and-objections/ http://www.c4ej.com/resources/a-simple-guide-to-land-value-tax http://markwadsworth.blogspot.com/2016/06/laffer-curve-of-planning.html "Tragedy of the Commons" style objections.
Nick Tideman explains the role of Land Speculation. (It can be good under some scenarios) http://www.wealthandwant.com/docs/Tideman_LTaELS.html There are both speculative and land-management reasons for spending resources on foreseeing changes in the opportunities to use land. The speculative reason is purely private, while the land-management reason is both private and social. Taxation of land reduces (in the limit, eliminates) the speculative reason for foreseeing land use opportunities, and thereby eliminates the waste of resources in seeking to be first to perceive such opportunities. In the absence of a speculative reason for foreseeing changes in land-use opportunities, a market might develop in insurance against changes that would generate land-management losses. All four taxes analyzed have the beneficial effect of reducing the waste of resources involved when people seek to be the ones who own land when its improved prospects become known. Taxes on land also have the beneficial effect of reducing the extent to which society suffers from an artificial scarcity of land induced by the winner's curse. In addition, taxes on land ameliorate the consequences of capital market imperfections. The least beneficial taxes on land are taxes on the realized income from land and on realized gains from the sale of land. They impose no explicit costs on those who hold land idle, and they tax entrepreneurship as well as land. A tax on realized income from land also has conceptual difficulties when applied to those who own the land they use. A tax on the realized gain from the sale of land has the unfortunate characteristic of being avoidable by refraining from transferring land. Taxes on the sale value and rental of land have no such unfortunate consequences. Taxes on the sale value of land do the most to discourage speculation. However, if assessors treat developed land as if it is more valuable than similar land that is not developed, there will be an inefficient incentive to postpone development. A very important effect of taxing land is the opportunity it provides for removing non-neutral taxes such as those on improvements. This is highly stimulative of development. A related stimulative opportunity that is created by taxing land is the opportunity to provide services such as water, sewerage and electricity at marginal cost. If nations that are setting up systems of private possession of land are concerned about land speculation, the best course of action is not to seek to regulate or prohibit speculation, but rather to tax land enough to make speculation not w The initial effect on the sale value of land of a tax on the rental value of land (disregarding general equilibrium effects and the value of any services financed by the tax), is to reduce the value of all land by the same percentage as the tax rate. That is, the tax is capitalized into the purchase price of land. It is borne by those who hold land at the time the tax is announced. Feldstein (1977) has shown that in a closed economy, a tax on rent can generate income effects that produce a new equilibrium with higher saving and lower interest rates, which have an upward effect on land prices, thereby shifting at least part of the tax. These effects do not arise in a small open economy, as when a single urban area taxes land. Furthermore, if the proceeds of the tax are used to finance public services that add to the value of land, it is possible for those who hold land to be better off with the combination of taxes and public expenditures than they would be with neither. In any case, income effects do not constitute economic distortions. A tax on the rental value of land has no distorting effects as long as it is assessed in such a way that there is no action that possessors of land can take that will increase or decrease their taxes. The effect on land speculation of a tax on the rental value of land is to reduce the return from being the one who possesses land when its improved prospects become known. Less effort will be spent in seeking to discover what land will rise in value and in seeking to acquire land in advance of when the rise in value becomes generally known. Because the winner's curse will be less prominent, less land will be withheld from development. With the incentive to speculate in land reduced by taxes on land, it might be expected that there will be a tendency for land to be developed prematurely out of ignorance of its future prospects. However, the land management motive for anticipating transitions remains. With taxes on the rental value of land, those who contemplate developing land will have an incentive to discover whether the land they plan to develop will rise in value, because if they do not take account of such prospects, they will find themselves with tax bills higher than they anticipated, and possibly with no additional revenue with which to pay them. In addition, as long as a tax on the rental value of land takes only part of the rental value, potential developers of land will also be motivated to perceive future opportunities because of the greater profit that can then be attained from improved development decisions Gaffney (1961, 1973) has suggested an additional reason why taxing land will improve the efficiency of land development decisions: It mitigates friction in the lending market. Land, he says, is an investment that commends itself to investors with low discount rates and high opportunity costs of their time. It requires little attention; unlike investments in on-going enterprises, land is unlikely to fall greatly in value as a consequence of neglect. Potential users of land, on the other hand, tend to be people who have above-average discount rates. Because of the combination of differing capacities of borrowers to offer collateral and the difficulties in identifying borrowers who will be good risks, an equilibrium can persist in which competing bidders for land have quite divergent discount rates. In such circumstances, the taxation of land ameliorates the variation in discount rates. The capitalization of land taxes into lower purchase prices constitutes a substitution of a recurring annual charge for a one-time charge. This makes land relatively more attractive to people with high discount rates, and relatively less attractive to people with low discount rates, shifting land out of the hands of people who will tend to leave it idle and into the hands of people who will tend to develop it. Since this circumvents friction in the lending market, the consequent earlier development of land is more efficient.
Land Reform Successful Land Reform using LVT https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/successfull-examples-of-land-value-tax-reforms/2011/02/05 Taiwan, Denmark, Estonia, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Singapore. Gen. Chiang Kai-shek likewise forced land reform on Taiwan (below). A 1980’s World Bank study credited land reform with creating the basis for their economic miracles. Secure farmers can afford to consume manufactured goods. Soon successful industries can trade with other developed nations. Another World Bank report, in 1998 by Roy Prosterman and Tiom Hanstad, Chapter 10, “Land Taxation” by Jennifer Duncan: “Land tax is an important vehicle for transferring some of the benefits of land privatization to the public sector. Revenues from land tax can fund significant and increasing portions of infrastructure and social services, fostering public and local government support for privatization.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_bonds#Land_bonds_in_Taiwan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_bonds#Land_bonds_in_South_Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Japan#Emphasis_on_stability_and_economic_growth Zimbabwe would have been spared a lot of suffering if they'd just listened to Joshua Nkoma Why Mugabe Killed a nation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haKgDkXKU24 https://academic.oup.com/afraf/article/116/465/549/3868619 In contrast to Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore, Rwanda and Ethiopia have failed to recapture land value so investment goes to urban land space and productive investment is starved. From South African Land Reform POV - with implementation details, policy proposals, and response to criticisms of implementation. Stephen Meintjies wrote a book: [Our Land our Rent Our Jobs] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-8268.12193 https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/2018-07-16-charging-of-land-rent-by-the-state-and-distributing-the-income-is-fairer/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAupS_nJsc0 - Most Taxes should be Abolished. (Good explanation) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQlf5TLk29E
South Africa's Urban Land Crisis: https://youtu.be/Uv349ZoJLEA Good charts on how public investment becomes land prices around 9:20
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2018-04-05-yes-we-can-and-must-expropriate-land/ Here is a true story about so-called property rights and investment. Five months ago, the government of Saudi Arabia arbitrarily arrested 200 of the richest people in the country. It claimed this was a “corruption sweep”, but there were no court trials, no legal process. The detainees were kept in detention until they signed away ownership stakes in their companies, or whole assets. The whole programme was conducted to fill a budget deficit left by lower oil prices. It was quite literally expropriation without compensation. Far from hiding this, the Saudi Arabian government has publicly boasted that it expropriated over R1.2-trillion, at least the same order of magnitude as all the agricultural land in South Africa. And the stock market is up 7% this year, not on government buying, or in oil stocks. Far from a downgrade, the rating agencies are about to include the Saudi stock exchange in several international indices. More generally, here is a non-exhaustive list of countries that have undertaken radical land reform, compulsorily dispossessing large landowners: Japan (1946-48); South Korea (1945-50); Taiwan, China (1950-); Mainland China (1947-55, 1962; 1978); Vietnam (1953-56); Cuba (1959); Peru (1969); Columbia (1968-69); Venezuela (2003); Iran (1962-71); Russia (1917-22); Ethiopia (1974); and Zimbabwe (2000). Some of those countries were subsequent disasters. Some were subsequently the greatest growth stories in history. Some were both, at different periods. The point is the absence of any fixed relationship. There is no evidence from anywhere that the violation of legal property rights inherited from an old regime has, in and of itself, any determinative effect on future growth or investment. Here is another case, perhaps the most extreme. At the height of the Cold War, in the 1970s to 1980s, Western banks lent the countries of the Warsaw Pact tens of billions of dollars. By 1982 such debts amounted to over $60-billion (roughly $150-billion today) lent to core members of the Soviet bloc. These were countries committed to having no property rights at home, and to the revolutionary overthrow of property rights everywhere. The banks didn’t care. They lent anyway.
Georgist Platform
+Politics +Politics:Platforms and Policy
https://taxshiftexplorer.org/ https://www.hgsss.org/lvt-calculator/
Law of Rent
Why is Rent so High? - Explains Law of Rent https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HZANYxnkWk It's odd, but although the Law of Rent is every bit as fundamental as the laws of supply and demand, or motion, or thermodynamics, a great many people have never heard of it. Why do you suppose that is?
Land Rental Value is the annual fee individuals are willing to pay for the exclusive right to use a land site for a period of time. Rental Value of land is also equal to the contributions society publicly makes to land value.
IOW: Rent is the price labor must pay for the opportunity to utilize its power. When the productive power of labor increases, rent also increases. All the advantages gained by the steady progress of society goes to higher rents and real wages do not increase. Perfect Market Theory cannot explain the price of land. Real estate is the only resource that people buy more of the more expensive it gets, which is a result of the law of rent in action. Returns to real estate are passive gains, funded by the labor of others to make a location desirable.
Ricardo noticed that the bargaining power of laborers can never dip below the produce obtainable on the best available rent-free land, because whenever rent leaves them with less than they could get on that free land, they can simply move to the new location. The produce obtainable on the best available rent-free land is known as the margin of production. Since landlords have a monopoly over a given location, the only limiting factor for rent is the margin of production. Thus, rent is a differential between the productive capacity of the land and the margin of production. The rental value of land can alternatively be expressed the amount that the second-most-efficient available user of that land would be willing to pay in order to use the land in place of the most efficient available user Capital Growth in Land is ultimately from Market Failure.
Explain Ricardo's Law of Rent PT 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyv1xYDWAxk&app=desktop Pt 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH7uisv0tfc See Also video from same author in the 'Rental Value' section below. -Perfect Market Theory cannot explain land values
Land is one of the most important elements of the economy. Land Values are the dominant factor in real estate prices. Price of land is actually unrelated to its productivity. When land is free there is no incentive to take on more than you can manage. As population pressure occupies more land the standard of living for all tenants and employees falls across entire land market, despite productivity not changing. Rental value increases on most productive land as marginal land is brought into production. Tenants on more productive land have a net income = income of the person settling on the least productive land. Wages are equalized across the entire community by rents. In a perfect market (mobile, informed) rents will be raised to the point where they take the marginal product. (Net product of all tenants, wages or entrepreneurship will be marginal.) See Wages Line. Rent will eventually be expressed as the difference between the basic productivity of the land and a minimal (subsistence) standard of living. Eplain Law of Rent and the Implications https://www.ethicaleconomics.org.uk/2010/08/the-law-of-rent-the-concept/ https://www.ethicaleconomics.org.uk/2010/09/the-law-of-rent-the-application/ Ricardian Rent in picture form https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/frjsa8/ive_updated_my_pictures_of_ricardos_really_rather/ https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/g7z8b3/land_economics_and_ground_rent_part_2_speculation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/hkofy6/land_economics_and_ground_rent_part_3_debt_lending/ https://i.redd.it/8k859zxnfqp41.jpg https://imgur.com/a/1sGEawI https://imgur.com/a/6OxFPJv https://imgur.com/a/BAmIP5H
Rent https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/l2l7q8/a_question_about_progress_and_poverty_book_viii/gk6l5qc/ So for our Classical purposes, we can divide the rent of land into two components: The natural resources found on the land, including the quality of farmland/grassland, mineral and carbohydrate reserves, freshwater and timber reserves, etc. This is the type of land value that François Quesnay, the father of Economics, was talking about when he published his Tableau Économique and first proposed that a government should tax only land rents. The distance to the nearest central business district of the land, ie. how far it is from the nearest location where goods and labour can be exchanged, and more specifically how much it costs to transport goods/labour to/from that location. This is the sort of land rent that Adam Smith pointed out in Wealth of Nations. David Ricardo then combined both of these two components into his Law of Rent, based on which Henry George founded his whole movement, and the rest is history... But how is this so called Ricardian rent assessed? The Mecklenburger economist Johann Heinrich von Thünen elucidated on that when he developed the first geographical model of land rent, his concentric circle model of agricultural land use, which for the first time accurately described the reasons for the distribution of production of different agricultural products. Over a century later in the 1960’s, William Alonso added to von Thünen’s model and developed the Bid Rent Theory. In the modern day, the land value component of property value is calculated using a multivariate differential function taking into account both natural resource value, polycentric bid rent, as well as samples of recent local sale/rent rates of land. Note that what I described is what’s called Ricardian rent. There’s also what’s called Paretian rent, which is for example what Pigouvian taxes are taxing. As an oversimplification, you can think of Paretian rent as rent derived from all other types of monopoly (in the broadest sense of the word) than just land monopoly, but the specifics are a topic for another day.
Explain Rent in wider context and why we should recapture it. https://evonomics.com/dont-ditch-capitalism-tax-extractive-side-effects-fuel-growth-barnes/ It’s important to recognize that the "tax" Smith spoke of isn’t the kind we pay to government; rather, it’s the kind we pay, much less visibly, to businesses with power. That’s because prices in capitalism are driven by four factors: supply, demand, market power and political power. The first two, which are omnipresent in economics texts, determine what might be called fair market value; the last two, which are prevalent in the real world, determine rent. Actual prices charged are the sum of fair market value and rent. Another way to say this is that rent is the extra money people pay above what they’d pay in truly competitive markets.
Law of Rent Example http://www.henrygeorge.org/rent1.htm http://www.henrygeorge.org/chart.htm Charting the costs of land speculation
Location Rent In economics, Thünen rent is an economic rent created by spatial variation or location of a resource. It is 'that which can be earned above that which can be earned at the margin of production'. Locational rent, a term used by Thünen in his argument, is to be understood as the equivalent to land value. It corresponds to the maximum amount a farmer could pay for using the land, without making losses. The location rent is given by the following equation:
L= Y(P-C) - YDF where the variables are defined as follows: L: Locational rent Y: Yield P: Market price of the crop C: Production cost of the crop D: Distance from the market F: Transport cost According to Fred Foldvary: In a competitive market, P=C if cost includes normal returns on asset value. If C is only the explicit costs, then P-C is the accounting profit. Is Y the yield of land? I don't understand Y(P-C), land yield times accounting profit.
Von Thunen's Model of Land use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Heinrich_von_Th%C3%BCnen http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/thunen.htm In the von thünen model the bid-rent function declined as a result of the increased transportation costs to transport the produce of one unit of land one additional unit of distance. Extended to Urban Land use by William Alonso
William Alonso's Bid-Rent Function Theory https://archive.org/details/locationlanduset0000alon/page/46 http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/alonso.htm Gives land use, rent, intensity of land use, population and employment as a function of distance to the CBD of the city as a solution of an economic equilibrium for the market for space. A preliminary rationalization of a bid-rent function for a household came out of the Chicago Transportation Study. There the results indicated that households behaved as though they had a combined rent and transportation budget such that if transportation cost were higher then the amount that they would pay for rent is lower. Bid-rent function theory may be formulated mathematically. Let U(x,h,T) be the utility function of a household where h is the amount of housing space used, T is the amount of leisure time and x is the consumption of other goods and services. The budget faced by the household is that of: px + rh = y0 + w(1-t-T) or equivalently px + rh + wT = y0 + w(1-t) where t is the commuting time, w the wage rate, y0 the nonwage income. Given t, r and p the household maximizes utility
Urban Agglomeration Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration https://www.amazon.com/Order-without-Design-Markets-Cities-ebook/dp/B07L3DJVHP/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=order+without+design&qid=1587287924&sprefix=order+with&sr=8-1 Economies of agglomeration or agglomeration effects are cost savings arising from urban agglomeration, a major topic of urban economics. One aspect of agglomeration is that firms are often located near to each other.[1]:1 This concept relates to the idea of economies of scale and network effects. As more firms in related fields of business cluster together, their costs of production may decline significantly (firms have competing multiple suppliers; greater specialization and division of labor result). Even when competing firms in the same sector cluster, there may be advantages because the cluster attracts more suppliers and customers than a single firm could achieve alone. Cities form and grow to exploit economies of agglomeration. Diseconomies of agglomeration are the opposite. For example, spatially concentrated growth in automobile-oriented fields may create problems of crowding and traffic congestion. It is the tension between economies and diseconomies that allows cities to grow but keeps them from becoming too large. The basic concept of agglomeration economies is that production is facilitated when there is a clustering of economic activity. The existence of agglomeration economies is central to the explanation of how cities increase in size and population, which places the phenomenon on a larger scale. The concentration of economic activity in cities is one reason for their development and growth.
Skyscrapers and land values: Evidence from Chicago on the costs of building tall cities https://voxeu.org/article/tall-buildings-and-land-values As shown in Figure 1, we find that land values and building heights are positively correlated, as suggested by neoclassic theory. The elasticity of height with respect to the land price at the time of construction is 45% for commercial buildings and 30% for residential buildings. The height elasticity about doubled over the 20th century. Following significant improvements in construction technology, developers now respond to increasing land prices by building taller at a much faster rate than in the past. Yet, building tall remains expensive. The height elasticity of construction cost with respect to height is about 25% for small structures (five floors and less), increasing in height, and exceeding 100% for super-tall structures. The cost of height is higher for residential than for commercial buildings. This result is consistent with a larger loss of usable floor space as building height increases, and is reflective of some notable differences in the design of commercial and residential towers. Tall residential buildings typically have a smaller floor plate size (due to the need for more exterior walls), use different materials (e.g. all-concrete due to acoustic reasons), and have more complex facades (with balconies and sunrooms), all of which is not advantageous for the construction of very tall buildings. These results have important implications for the determinants of urban spatial structure, as they suggest that there is a supply-side mechanism that promotes the typical land-use segregation observed within cities. The strong concentrations of economic activity that are typically observed within clusters – such as central business districts, sub-centres, or edge cities – are likely to be attributable not only to strong agglomeration forces, but also to a relatively lower cost of accommodating commercial uses in tall structures that minimise the use of expensive land. Our results also have important implications for policymakers concerned with the affordability of their cities, as they suggest that it is difficult to combat escalating rents by means of skyscraper development alone. Beyond intermediate heights, the cost of building tall increases quickly and at an exponential rate. Ultimately, affordable space can only be provided if a city does not only grow vertically, but also horizontally. This is an important lesson for cities with already dense land use and binding urban growth boundaries such as London. ELEVATORS are FREE! The owner of a building provides free elevators so he can get rent above the lower floors. Mass transit is actually just like an elevator. (point made here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kXAD_QZC9A around 1 hour mark.) Similarly, a Mall is a place full of renters with public goods provided by the owners. (Security, entrances, etc.) Freeways Freeway expansion lead to the artificial dispersion of Rent by negating locational advantage of inner cities. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/10/21/the-other-reason-freeway-building-hollowed-out-americas-cities
Henry George Theorem
According to Stiglitz' Henry George Theorem: The amount of land rent in a particular domain is approximately equal to all public spending at all levels in that domain.' Vickery claims DC has never had a public works project that didn't pay for itself in land values. (See the research page on Henry George Theorem for updated studies) https://schalkenbach.org/the-henry-george-theorem/ under certain circumstances, a public service will increase land rent[1] enough that, if the increase in land rent is collected as public revenue, this revenue will sufficient to pay for the service. For many public services, such as parks and libraries, their benefit is greater to the people who are closer to the place where the service itself is provided. Therefore, people bid up the rental value of land that is closer to provision of such desirable services. If all of the benefits from proximity to a new public service are reflected in increased rents, and if the service is worth at least as much as it costs to provide, then public collection of the increase in rents will suffice to pay for the service. 1,) the public service must be worthwhile. 2.) access to the benefits of the public service must be spatially limited. 3.) there must be a market process by which rents are determined. 4.) there must be enough people who are both a) mobile b) able to benefit from the service in full to bid up rents to a degree equal to or greater than the value of the full benefit of the service. Economic Capitalization - Public goods are capitalized into land values. https://www.progress.org/articles/economic-capitalization Economic capitalization” is the conversion of a flow of income into a stock of value. This is also referred to as the present value of a future flow. Imagine a place that had a lake, but is now dry. A river starts flowing into the lake. If you measure the volume of river water per day, you would be able to measure how big the lake will be in a week. The water flow is capitalized into a stock or amount of water. If one were to sell the value of that water today, even before the lake is full, it would be the present value of the expected flow of water. As real estate is a major asset and a major cost for households and enterprise, the capitalization of territorial benefits is an important economic phenomenon. The net benefits of the public goods and civic services provided by government generate higher land rent and become capitalized into higher land values because most of the payment comes from taxes other than on that land value. A worker who is also a renter pays both higher rent and taxes for the public goods. If the worker-tenant is double-billed, someone is getting subsidized - the landowner. Owners of land obtain higher land value because their sites get services paid for by others, from taxes on wages, enterprise profits, value added, and the sale of goods. "This implicit subsidy constitutes a forced redistribution of wealth from workers to landowners. This redistribution is a major reason why wages have stagnated even while economies have kept growing. The higher rent is not recognized because most of it is masked in forms such as profits, interest, dividends, and taxes." The capitalization of benefits into land value has another consequence: much of the gains from economic expansion, due to both better technology and more investments in education and capital goods, gets captured by higher rent and land value. The increase in real estate prices during an economic boom attracts speculators who create an unsustainable bubble that then crashes and brings down with it the financial sector, as happened in 2008.
Every dollar of public investment ends up in land prices. https://www.homelight.com/blog/school-district-impact-on-property-values/ One analysis from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that overall, every $1 spent on school funding increases property values by about $20. Per Martin Smolka of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uv349ZoJLEA See above point about mass transit working like an elevator. see also Henry George Theorem
Land is a unique factor of production http://www.wealthandwant.com/docs/Gaffney_LaaDFoP.html Land ownership actively reallocates labor and capital toward less productive businesses. https://www.bis.org/publ/work904.htm
If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too Improving the quality of life in cities matters to more than just the people who live in them. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-26/if-you-can-t-afford-the-rent-it-s-my-problem-too Consider an increase in the quality of public services — say, garbage collection, or perhaps in San Francisco the elimination of public urination. You might think that would make life much better for everyone. But in a Ricardo-George model, that is not the case. Mainly what happens is that rents go up and landowners capture most of the newly created surplus. How would this work? Take the example of San Francisco; with nicer streets, even more people might want to move there. That would push up rents by an amount roughly equal to the value created — putting the gains from the higher quality of life into the pockets of landowners. In a normal market economy, those higher rents would then induce more construction and, eventually, a corresponding decline in rents. But San Francisco is a “not in my backyard” locale where the amount of new construction just isn’t that high, for legal and regulatory reasons. Again, as both Ricardo and George realized, the incidence of the benefit falls upon the very scarce factor, namely land. The political economy problem now should be obvious: Why exactly would non-landowners press for improvements in their cities? The value of those improvements will be captured mainly by other parties. By the same token, the incentives are skewed when it comes to the cost of problems. Say air pollution or homelessness gets worse. You might think that would degrade the quality of life in a city. But don’t leap to that conclusion too quickly: To the extent land is truly scarce, the main effect would be a decline in rents and real estate prices. Landowners would be worse off, but the typical city resident might find that the cheaper cost of living offsets the deterioration in conditions. Once you think about these cities in terms of the Ricardo-George model, it is remarkable how many orthodox views get revised. What about an increase in the minimum wage, for example? Any initial gains for workers will eventually be offset by higher rents. Like most economic adjustments, these effects are more potent in the long term than in the short term. But the upshot is the same: In a NIMBY-controlled world, many of our most glorious cities will slowly but surely fall apart. Voters just won’t care enough about the quality of public services, and furthermore many voters might end up using their votes to express their ideology (even more so than usual) rather than to elect leaders to solve problems.
Ricardo's Law ~ The Great Tax Clawback Scam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZkfmY1PMng Any progressive taxation is resturned to the rich by way of rents. (See Henry George Theorem for how public goods increase price of land.) https://www.landandliberty.net/the-henry-george-theorem/ https://schalkenbach.org/the-henry-george-theorem/ The poor subsidize the rich. Over their lifetime, Britain's Top Earners pay on average about 1.25 million pounds in taxes. Lower income people, who tend to be renters pay about 0.25 million pounds over their lifetime. During a boom year, a rich landowner can clawback a lifetime's paid taxes, while the poor are forced to pay more. https://old.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/nzb9im/if_you_like_progressive_taxation_then_you_should/ same in US. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Du6wU05sgI @ ~ 13:00 claims William Vickery showed that there has never been a public works project that didn't pay for itself in land value increases. (See Henry George Theorem) in reference to DC metro https://www.homelight.com/blog/school-district-impact-on-property-values/ One analysis from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that overall, every $1 spent on school funding increases property values by about $20. (See the research page on Henry George Theorem for updated studies) The rich do pay less in taxes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXCGbAv8YPw https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/11/4/20938229/zucman-saez-tax-rates-top-400 Taxes fall more on lower classes than the upper, despite what nominal rates say. (see also Fred Harrison's Ricardo's law)
ATCOR - All Taxes Come Out of Rent According to Locke(?). No taxes can be paid if no body wants to live or work there. Explaining ATCOR, EBCOR, And More +ATCOR https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/lnxsc3/explaining_atcor_ebcor_and_more/ ATCOR and EBCOR https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/izkwbv/can_someone_please_explain_like_im_5_why_atcor/ https://schalkenbach.org/the-taxable-capacity-of-land/ Taxes on wages, profits and consumption have the effect of lowering land rents and values by at least as much as what they would pay by direct taxes on rents. This means that, in reality, most revenue from conventional taxes are actually derived from the rents in the economy. This is the ATCOR thesis. “ATCOR” (All Taxes Come Out of Rents) may look novel and therefore scary, but its lineage is shown by its other name, “The Physiocratic Doctrine of Tax Incidence”. It dates at least from Quesnay and Turgot and is found in Adam Smith, their student. But there is more – much more. EBCOR is the acronym for the theory of “excess burden” – the losses that arise from collecting revenue by means of conventional taxes. Taxes on wages, on profits and consumption have the effect of lowering land rents and values by MORE than what they would pay by direct taxes on rents. What the hell is ATCOR? - Excerpt from “The Hidden Taxable Capacity of Land”, Mason Gaffney, 2009, International Journal of Social Economics 36(4):328-411, pp. 370-76. http://slrg.scot/what-the-hell-is-atcor/ https://economics.ucr.edu/papers/papers08/08-12old.pdf http://www.masongaffney.org/publications/G2009-Hidden_Taxable_Capacity_of_Land_2009.pdf The meaning and relevance of ATCOR is that when we lower other taxes, the revenue base is not lost, but shifted to land rents and values, which can then yield more revenue. It has shown that builders offer more for land, and sellers demand more, when the new buildings are to be untaxed. The effect on revenue is the same as taxing prospective new buildings before they are even built, even though the new buildings are not to be taxed at all. We also observe the ATCOR principle at work in many analogous situations – Lowering the corporate income tax rate raises stock prices – Lowering interest rates raises real estate prices – Commercial rents are multipartite, and a lower share of gross revenues means a higher fixed rent. – Oil leases are multipartite, and a higher fixed royalty rate means lower bonus bids; – Wartime taxes depress land prices, while peace dividends let them rise again. There is a long world history of peace dividends followed by land booms. – The Resource Curse Effect: an influx of mineral revenues, obviating other taxes, leads to land booms. – The remarkable productivity of the U.S. income tax when wages were exempt, 1916-30, and we paid for World War I with less deficit finance than any other belligerent. – The utility-rate effect: lower rates mean higher rents and land prices, as observed in practice and explained in theory by Hotelling, Vickrey, Stiglitz, Feldstein, and others. The thesis that all taxes are shifted to landowners follows from three major premises. One, the supply of land is fixed inside every tax jurisdiction, by definition. Two, after-tax interest rates are determined by world markets, so the local supply of capital is perfectly elastic at a fixed, after-tax rate. Three, labor is also quite mobile – that is how most of our ancestors got here, and then migrated and continue to move all over North America, not to mention switching jobs in the same city. Many of the “top ten cities” of 1900 can hardly make the top 50 today, while many of today’s top ten were not even on the radar in 1900.' Were we to tax land more and production and consumption and capital less, real wage rates would rise, as better land use and more investing increased demand for labor and lowered product prices. This was the theme of Progress and Poverty, and the primary goal of George’s reforms. He likened the land market, beset by imperfections like speculation, to an unconscious universal cartel withholding much good land from full use, forcing labor and investors out to worse land. In the event, however, that real wage rates should rise enough to absorb some of the gains from tax reform, it would not lower tax revenues from land. The rise of wages in the Georgist system implies a rise of GDP. The rise would result from removing the excess burdens of current taxes, which in turn will first raise the marginal productivity of labor. That would ensue from opening the “internal frontier”. One can also view that as ending the artificial scarcity of land. This means that workers who now each add, say, $20,000 a year to GDP in menial tasks, or struggling on marginal land, would instead add $40,000 a year each. While this would redistribute income against rents, much of the increase would come from a net rise of GDP.
http://www.wealthandwant.com/themes/ATCOR.html Portal to a number of related articles.
Explain ATCOR with simple illustration http://www.landisfree.co.uk/sa-81-all-taxes-come-out-of-rents-by-rumplestatskin/ You may not realise it, but in the neoclassical market model capital inputs are all leased by firms, and compensated are their marginal contribution to production. This leads to a very circular analysis and an inability to properly understand the concept of rents. For example, when we whittle our way through the production chain down to the landowner, who has one input, land, the neoclassical framing say that this owner rents their land inputs, which are compensated at their marginal contribution to production. Okay. So she rents off another person who owns the land, who we then model as renting from another person, and so on. The buck never stops. That’s what happens when you conflate land and capital into a single input. They nee to be treated differently because land is not an output of any production process, unlike capital. When you allow the buck to stop at ownership of land and natural resources, you get a very different picture of the economy. One in which the taxation capacity of rents is not limited their current value. As Gaffney points out, when we “lower other taxes, the revenue base is not lost, but shifted to land rents and values, which can then yield more taxes”.
ATCOR with a more complicated illustration. https://markwadsworth.blogspot.com/2018/01/atcor-and-tax-incidence.html
You cannot tax wage or production beyond what labor or capital is willing to accept. http://thedepression.org.au/all-taxes-come-out-of-rent-atcor/ The meaning and relevance of ATCOR is that when we lower other taxes, the revenue base is not lost, but shifted to land rents and values, which can then yield more taxes. This is most obvious with taxes on buildings. When we exempt buildings, and raise tax rates on the land under them, we are still taxing the same real estate; we are just taxing it in a different way. We will show that this “different way” actually raises the revenue capacity of real estate by a large factor. There is much recent historical experience with exempting buildings from the property tax, in whole or part. It has shown that builders offer more for land, and sellers demand more, when the new buildings are to be untaxed. The effect on revenue is the same as taxing prospective new buildings before they are even built, even though the new buildings are not to be taxed at all. The revenue capacity of land, when it is substituted for other tax bases, is comparable to current revenues. Owing to efficiency effects, and renewal effects, it is actually higher, as shown next in Element #12. The major reservation is that the supply of labor is not totally elastic, so some of the revenue gains may be “lost” in higher wage rates, but on the whole higher wage rates are socially desirable, and serve to lower many public costs as for welfare, policing and jailing, aggressive military spending, make-work projects, etc. http://www.georgistjournal.org/2012/10/16/the-unplumbed-revenue-potential-of-land-part-3-atcor-all-taxes-come-out-of-rents/ http://www.wealthandwant.com/themes/ATCOR.html https://www.prosper.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Trickle-Up-Economics-Report-final.pdf Summary http://hereticus-economicus.info/the-trickle-up-economics-of-privatized-land-rents/
EBCOR - excess burdens come out of rents https://thedepression.org.au/excess-burden/ this article looks at the amount of deadweight loss there was from 1972 to 2006 in Australia As you can see, in just 2006 alone, the deadweight loss generated during that period was over $1T, and back then the GDP of Australia was only $922B. See also https://web.archive.org/web/20190808113646/http://www.taxreview.treasury.gov.au/content/submissions/pre_14_november_2008/Bryan_Kavanagh.pdf
Cannan's Law - dissipation of rent by being too attractive to immigrants. In 1907 Cannan fired off a round at local rating of site values. It hit home. First he recited the logic of what today we call the “tragedy of the commons” (it was common coin long before Garrett Hardin). Then he pointed out that a city taxing only site values to provide free public services would attract too many people and too much capital. A city is an “open economy,” free to immigration of everything but land, something like an open range or fishery. Even if all cities tax only site values, cities with more rents per head may support public services at higher levels, and so attract immigrants. This distorts locational decisions, attracting people to jobs of lesser productivity where they may gain from better public services. This is “Cannan’s Law" acording to Mason Gaffney https://economics.ucr.edu/papers/papers02/02-17.pdf There are three bad results from Cannan’s Law.
One is an uneconomical distribution of population, as cities with more rentable lands attract more of mobile labor and capital than they should. “dissipation of economic rent.” To make it simple, consider a rich but crowded fishery where another fishing boat added to the crowd will not raise the total catch at all, but simply take fish from other crews who were already there. Interlopers will keep entering until the average boat and crew just make costs, leaving no net rent for anyone. This has long been standard economic lore. As Cannan writes, if a locality uses its rents to benefit all its “inhabitants,” people will flock to the richest places until there is no further gain to immigrants because they have wiped out all the rent. lower the incentive of local governments to provide public services that are open to all comers. It fosters local institutions and attitudes that are harshly hostile to newcomers and outsiders, especially to the poor, young, homeless, hungry, and vagrant. Some successes entail barriers to immigration. Alaska early on set out to limit its social dividend to citizens with five years prior residence in Alaska. It immediately lost out to the ghost of Madison. In Zobel v. Williams (1982)18 the U.S. Supreme Court called this provision a barrier to interstate migration, and struck it down. Alaska’s annual oil dividend survived, but were it not for Zobel might be much higher than today. Meantime, Alaskan landowners pay no property taxes. There goes much of the dividend, and Anchorage is the most sprawled city in North America. Significantly, exclusionary zoning has NOT been ruled a barrier to interstate migration. Neither have state and city commuter taxes that tax the income of people who live in one state and work in another. It may depend on whose ox is being gored. Ethnic political machines tap into local rents while restricting the benefits to a closed circle that is hard to enter. Note, though, that many machine politicians - Al Smith is the poster boy - have been friendlier to Georgist reforms than have patrician “good government” reformers. Theocracies with a religious test for entry are noteworthy. Two obvious cases are Congregationalist New England of the 17th Century, and Mormon Utah of the 19th Century. Each was marked by egalitarian sharing of rents among the faithful. Neither was able or wanted to expand its example to encompass other faiths, however, except via conversion. (SEE ALSO ANCIENT JEWS) California has quite a history of taxing land for public benefits. But what public? California cannot exclude U.S. citizens directly, but does so indirectly by winking at the widespread use of illegal alien labor for stoop and sweatshop work. These aliens repel eastern U.S. immigrants, while the aliens, mostly non-voting, are excluded from most public benefits. Taxes on the use and improvement of marginal lands sterilize them, said George, "and tend to drive population and wealth from them to the great cities." Godfrey Dunkley argues convincingly that that is what VAT did, when South Africa adopted it for the very purpose of making marginalized blacks pay taxes.20 That is not the last word on the subject either, but shows there is more to it than Cannan began to disclose. As George maintained, aborting rent on marginal land, not just rent-sharing on superior land, distorts locational decisions. In the single-tax era in western Canada, that crested ca. 1919, organized real estate people were a major force promoting the exemption of buildings.21 They often support land tax increases: some of them even opposed Proposition 13 in California. They recognize the role of infrastructure in promoting economic development, and the benefits of untaxing buildings. Chambers of Commerce, however, now put much more emphasis on attracting capital than labor. Changes in fiscal federalism, discussed below, have reshaped their incentives and Rental value
Land, Property, and Value Pt1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNDzwUOQUjQ Capital growth in land is ultimately derived from Market failure.
Pt2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7AwnAzTgd8 Distributive & Commutative Justice Very nice definition of basic economic terms. (Also takes quick swipe at Neoclassical economics) 1.) The real question in economics is the distribution between land and labor.
The Economics of Real Estate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4o9aPFI3I0 What is Economic Value and who creates it? Mariana Mazzucato https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXrCeiQxWyc The private appropriation of publicly generated land rent is a de-facto tax. It's a "redistribution of wealth" from those who produce to those who don't. It is, in short, "welfare" for landlords. Georgist Theory of Value versus Marx (Labor Theory of Value) and Austrian (Subjective) http://www.georgistjournal.org/2012/10/15/why-are-theories-of-value-important/ Marx and Austrians ignore land. George's opinion on value and exchange value. https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/mpqvzl/georges_opinion_on_value_and_exchange_value/ "Let me put the proposition in another form: The current theory is that it is when and because a thing becomes exchangeable that it becomes valuable. My contention is that the truth is just the reverse of this, and it is when and because a thing becomes valuable that it becomes exchangeable. It is not the toil and trouble which a thing has cost that gives it value. It may have cost much and yet be worth nothing. It may have cost nothing and yet be worth much. It is the toil and trouble that others are now willing, directly or indirectly, to relieve the owner of, in exchange for the thing, by giving him the advantage of the results of exertion, while dispensing him of the toil and trouble that are necessary accompaniments of exertion. Whether I have obtained a diamond, for instance, by years of hard toil or by merely stooping to pick it up — a movement which can hardly be called an exertion, since it is in itself but a gratification of curiosity which does not involve irksomeness — has nothing whatever to do with its value. That depends upon the amount of toil and trouble that others will undergo for my benefit in exchange for it; or what amounts to the same thing, which they will dispense me of in the satisfaction of my desire, by giving me things in exchange, for which others will undergo toil and trouble."
Estimating Rental Value http://wealthandwant.com/docs/Gwartney_Estimating_LV.html Land Market Value = (Land Rental Value - Land Taxes)/Capitalization Rate Land Market Value is the land rental value, minus land taxes, divided by a capitalization rate. (1) Each of these terms is defined as follows: Land Rental Value is the annual fee individuals are willing to pay for the exclusive right to use a land site for a period of time. This may include a speculative opportunity cost. Land Taxes is the portion of the land rental value that is claimed for the community. Capitalization Rate is a market determined rate of return that would attract individuals to invest in the use of land, considering all of the risks and benefits which could be realized. Land Market Value is the land rental value, minus land taxes, divided by a capitalization rate.
Capital values versus rental values https://www.labourland.org/downloads/papers/chapters/4.pdf The methods most frequently used for valuing land give its capital value. This is often presented as a problem, because for the purposes of charging landowners for the use of the land that they occupy on an ongoing (normally annual) basis, it is generally assumed that it is the rental value that is required. However, in a modern economy, it makes little difference, because capital values can easily be converted into rental values simply by multiplying capital values by the prevailing discount rate, which is the average going rate of return on capital invested in all economic activities. Conversely, rental values can be converted into capital values by dividing by the discount rate. For example, if the discount rate is 10 per cent, a site with a capital value or market price of £100,000 would have a rental value of £10,000 per annum (the capital value of £100,000 multiplied by the discount rate of 0.1). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNDzwUOQUjQ Capital Appreciation in Land derives ultimately from Market failure.
Not only are workers more productive on the best locations, but more can work there, per unit of area — because of infrastructure and other synergistic factors. (See urban agglomeration) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration http://www.georgistjournal.org/2017/04/10/charting-the-costs-of-land-speculation/#more-1900 Wealth output has increased, because workers are more productive, now that more of them have access to the better land, from which they were previously locked out. Infrastructure cost is less, because development no longer leapfrogs past unused land. Because of more efficient use of land across the board, some land is now unused, despite the fact that it had been provided with roads, schools, police protection, etc. It would make sense to use society’s rent fund to pay the relatively low cost of maintaining that infrastructure. If that were done, there would be usable free land, available to anyone who wished to use it — all in all, quite a practical anti-poverty program!
How Much Rent is there?
https://www.deptofnumbers.com/rent/us/
About half of all lending in the US is just real estate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVvVVdr__gA&feature=youtu.be&list=PLEI97cRvOTGWQd-5z4gBEKvrij_Sws74M&fbclid=IwAR1tnnNDIrfCQeILxQHZcTCs2gxHLquqxdhY4Cvtwje6bj4jESWut0JMwnE ~ 26 minutes Land Share of Real Estate Values http://www.wealthandwant.com/themes/LSREV.html https://www.aei.org/housing/land-price-indicators/ See also: Mason Gaffney: Hidden taxable capacity of land. See also: Mason Gaffney: The Unplumbed Revenue Potential of Land https://schalkenbach.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/The-Unplumbed-Revenue-Potential-of-Land.pdf As it happens, a 5% tax is (usually) a rough idea of the total rental value of land. Just to be clear. A 5% tax is on historical capitalized values. A 100% tax on rent values would presumably generate revenue equal to ~5% of current capitalized values, and reduce future capitalized values to 0. The market would only be willing to pay the 100% tax on rent per year, and nothing to the current holder besides paperwork fees and the cost of transaction. http://www.henrygeorge.org/rem42.htm Because Australia has a long tradition of recording land assessments separately from improvements — and in many places collecting land value taxes — data on aggregate rent is easier to uncover in Australia than in other nations. A 2003 study by Terry Dwyer that surveyed Australian land value records from 1911 to 1999 showed privately collected land rent to be as much as 26% of Australian GDP — more than the 24% of GDP currently collected in taxes, of which only a very small portion is publicly collected land rent. This study was updated by Gavin Putland of Prosper Australia in 2018 Trickle-Up Economics - Assessing the impact of privatized land rent on economic growth https://www.prosper.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Trickle-Up-Economics-Report-final.pdf See summrary Here. http://hereticus-economicus.info/the-trickle-up-economics-of-privatized-land-rents/ The economic rent of land (rental value plus smoothed realized capital gains) has increased from 2% of GDP in the early 1950s to more than 20% of GDP in 2017. Since 2003, the economic rent of land has consistently exceeded 15% of GDP. Private rent extraction is a drain on the capacity of workers and employers to invest in future growth. “Rent-seeking may, indeed, impose costs to the economy as high, if not higher, than those arising from corruption.” ~Anthony Ogus, Corruption and Regulatory Structures June 26, 2003 The Global Financial Crisis and the recession of the early 1990s were preceded by notable shrinkage of the percentage of GDP accruing to labour and capital, as distinct from land. An increase in land rent of 1% of GDP corresponds to a loss of 0.124% per annum in GDP growth. When labour and capital get a greater fraction of GDP, growth is faster, and the cumulative effect of that growth will eventually make landowners better off in absolute terms, although not in relative terms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h05FIlk1fsk Fred Foldvary on Smart Talk ~ 22 minutes or so. Rent is around 1/3 of GNP Monopoly profits other than rent are only around 3% of GNP. https://www.progress.org/articles/scholars-guess-how-many-in-this-market
Why Rent can't be passed on https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_V/Chapter_2 http://www.wealthandwant.com/themes/Not_Passed_On.html http://www.wealthandwant.com/docs/Kavanaugh_Landlord_can%27t_pass.html Quotes and References from Economists and Politicians. https://bluerepublik.wordpress.com/2019/07/31/welfare-economics-of-the-land-value-tax/ (Excellently Explained with Supply Curves and Math) Trying to pass a LVT on to renters harms the landlord more than if he absorbs it. In response to a Land Value Tax, Landlords will serve to maximize their own best interests, and absorb the entirety of the tax, meaning no deadweight loss occurs, and renters have no tax burden to worry about. https://schalkenbach.org/library/henry-george/hg-speeches/why-the-landowner-cannot-shift-the-tax-on-land-values.html https://web.archive.org/web/20170205021009/https://schalkenbach.org/library/henry-george/hg-speeches/why-the-landowner-cannot-shift-the-tax-on-land-values.html Here, for instance, is a piece of land that has a value— let it be where it may. Its rent, or value, is the highest price that anyone will give for it—it is a bonus which the man who wants to use the land must pay to the man who owns the land for permission to use it. Nor, if a tax be levied on that rent or value, this in no wise adds to the willingness of anyone to pay more for the land than before; nor does it in any way add to the ability of the owner to demand more. To suppose, in fact, that such a tax could be thrown by landowners upon tenants is to suppose that the owners of land do not now get for their land all it will bring; is to suppose that, whenever they want to, they can put up prices as they please. This is, of course, absurd. There could be no limit whatever to prices did the fixing of them rest entirely with the seller. To the price which will be given and received for anything, two wants or wills must concur—the want or the will of the buyer, and the want or will of the seller. The one wants to give as little as he can, the other to get as much as he can, and the point at which the exchange will take place is the point where these two desires come to a balance or effect a compromise. In other words, price is determined by the equation of supply and demand. And, evidently, taxation cannot affect price unless it affects the relative power of one or other of the elements of this equation.
https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/cweomb/eli5_why_is_georgism_bad_for_landlords_and_why_do/eyatvix/ Originally By Green Meklar It's not that the landlords can't pass on the LVT to the tenants, but more like they're already passing it on. They already charge the tenants as much as they can get away with. They can't raise the price, because if they could raise the price, they already would have raised it before the tax went into effect. (After all, it's free money, and everybody wants as much of that as they can get.) Here's a thought experiment to illustrate the concept. Imagine if you inherited a special, unique marble sculpture by Michelangelo that only your family knew about. You know it's valuable, and you want to sell it so you can retire to Hawaii and never have to work again. An art appraiser tells you that it's worth $12 million; and when you offer it to museums, the Uffizi is willing to pay $10 million for it, the British Museum is willing to pay $11 million, and the Louvre is willing to pay $12 million. Okay, but now imagine that the government wants to tax you 20% on sales of artwork. In order to pocket your original $12 million, you would need to increase your sale price to $15 million. But you can't do this! The highest offer was only $12 million. The highest offer is $12 million regardless of how much tax you have to pay on the sale, because the museums don't care how much tax you pay. If you want to sell the piece, your best option is to sell it to the Louvre at $12 million and pocket a 'mere' $9.6 million after paying the tax. Effectively, you pay the entire tax on the sale, because you're already charging as much as you can for the one sculpture you have to sell. The key here is that the Michelangelo sculpture is fixed in supply. There's just the one piece, and neither you nor anybody else can create a second one, nor can you constrain the supply of the one that exists (other than by breaking it, but that would just be a waste). That one item is all you have to bargain with, so the buyers get to set the price, and the tax has no effect on that price. The same sort of thing happens with land. The amount of land that actually exists is all the landlords have to bargain with, and they're already charging as much as they can for it, so they can't increase the price in response to the tax. http://www.econlib.org/library/Ricardo/ricP3.html#Ch.10, Taxes on Rent http://www.econlib.org/library/Ricardo/ricP3a.html#Ch.12, Land-Tax My interpretation of the argument is that since labor and capital will move to the location where they earn the highest return, they will move to lower rent areas if land owners in higher rent areas attempt to pass on the tax. The land value tax allows labor and capital to move to lower rent areas to avoid attempts by landowners to pass on the tax in higher rent areas, because the land value tax does not follow labor and capital to lower rent locations. Rather, the land value tax drops off to zero at the marginal locations which are the least productive in use. If the land tax was flat and taxed all land equally regardless of location (ie it was not a tax on land values), then labor and capital would not be able to avoid the attempts of land owners to pass on the tax, as the tax would follow labor and capital and still be present wherever they moved. http://blog.lvrg.org.au/2011/08/why-land-tax-cant-be-shifted-onto.html http://www.landvaluetax.org/frequently-asked-questions/ The answer to this question is very simple if you imagine yourself in the situation of a landlord. As a landlord, I already charge as much as I can obtain for my property. I may decide to charge a bit below top rate so as to avoid it being empty, or I may stick out for the last penny which means I must accept that the property will be empty for 10% of the time. Either way, I am getting as much is I possibly can. Once LVT is introduced, then I am liable to pay the tax whether the property is occupied or not. So I have a stronger incentive to set the price competitively so as to ensure that it is vacant for as short a time as possible.
Can Landlords really pass on higher property taxes to tenants? https://mitcre.mit.edu/news/can-landlords-really-pass-higher-property-taxes-tenants Study shows 80% or more of tax on improvements is passed thru to tenants. When UK taxed 'Buy to Rent' properties, Rent actually decreased even though incomes increased during the same time. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/jan/23/uk-rents-fall-for-first-time-in-a-decade https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/oct/16/taxes-buy-to-let-landlords-rents-generation-rent-buyers
Land is the highest returning asset class over the long term.
Land is a fundamentally different asset class, it is truly a distinct, unique factor of production. Throughout history land and its necessity to sustain life and generate wealth has played an pivotal role in economic and financial calculations. Smart people who recognize this can make outsize returns without others realizing how it works.
Why is Land Different? https://evonomics.com/josh-ryan-collins-land-economic-theory/ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/253005405_Land_as_a_Distinctive_Factor_of_Production http://www.wealthandwant.com/docs/Gaffney_LaaDFoP.html Land is permanent, cannot be produced or reproduced, cannot be ‘used up’ and does not depreciate. None of these features apply to capital. Capital goods are produced by humans, depreciate over time due to physical wear and tear and innovations in technology (think of computers or mobile phones) and they can be replicated. In any set of national accounts, you will find a sizeable negative number detailing physical capital stock ‘depreciation’: net not gross capital investment is the preferred variable used in calculating a nations’s output. When it comes to land, net and gross values are equal. Indeed, although land values change with – or some would say drive – economic and financial cycles, in the long run land value usually appreciates rather than depreciates like capital. This is inevitable when you think about it – as the population grows, the economy develops and the capital stock increases, land remains fixed. The result is that land values (ground rents) must rise, unless there is some countervailing non-market intervention. Indeed, there is good argument that as economies mature, the demand for land relative to other consumer goods increases. Land is a ‘positional good’, the desire for which is related to one’s position in society vis a vis others and thus not subject to diminishing marginal returns like other factors. As technological developments drive down the costs of other goods, so competition over the most prized locational space rises and eats up a greater and greater share of people’s income as Adair Turner has recently argued. (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691169644/between-debt-and-the-devil) A recent study of 14 advanced economies found that 81% of house price increases between 1950 and 2012 can be explained by rising land prices with the remainder attributable to increases in construction costs (http://voxeu.org/article/home-prices-1870) Consequences of the neglect of land Today’s economics textbooks – in particular microeconomics – slavishly follow the tenets of marginal productivity theory. ‘Income’ is understood narrowly as a reward for one’s contribution to production whilst wealth is understood as ‘savings’ due to one’s productive investment effort, not as unearned windfalls from being the owner of land or other naturally scarce sources of value. In many advanced economies land values – and capital gains made from increasing property prices – are not properly measured and tracked over time. As Steve Roth has noted for Evonomics, the U.S.’ National accounts does not properly take in to account capital gains and changes in household’s ‘net worth’, much of which is driven by changes in land values In the UK, land is not included as a distinct asset class in the National Accounts, despite being one of the largest and most important asset classes in the economy. Instead, the value of the underlying land is included in the value of dwellings and other buildings and structures, which are classed as ‘produced non-financial assets Even progressive economists such as Thomas Piketty have fallen in to this trap. Once you strip out capital gains (mainly on housing), Piketty’s spectacular rise in the wealth-to-income ratio recorded in advanced economics in the last 30 years starts to look very ordinary (Figure 1 shows the comparison for great Britain since 1970). Thus this huge growth in wealth relative to the rest of the economy originates not from the saving of income derived from people’s contribution to production (activity that would have created jobs and raised incomes), but rather from windfalls resulting from exclusive control of a scarce natural resource: land. This may help us explain – at least in part – the great ‘productivity puzzle’– that is, why productivity (and related average incomes) been flat-lining, even as ‘wealth’ has been increasing. The puzzle is explained by the fact that the majority of the growth in wealth has come from capital gains rather than increased profits (or savings) derived from productive investment, Savings are at a fifty year low in the UK even as the wealth to income ratio hits record highs. When the value of land under a house goes up, the total productive capacity of the economy is unchanged or diminished because nothing new has been produced: it merely constitutes an increase in the value of the asset. This may increase the wealth of the landowner and they may choose to spend more or drawn down some of that wealth via home equity withdrawal. But they equally many not. Moreover, the rise in the value of that asset has a corresponding cost: someone else in the economy will have to save more for a deposit or see their rents increase and as a result spend less (or, in the case of the firm, invest less). In current national accounts, however, only the increase in wealth is recorded, whilst the present discounted value of the decreased flow of resources to the rest of the economy is ignored as Joe Stiglitz has pointed out. (https://www.nber.org/papers/w21327) Rising land values suck purchasing power and demand out of the economy, as the benefits of growth are concentrated in property owners with a low marginal propensity to consume, which in turn reduces spending and investment. In addition, most new credit creation by the banking system now flows in to real estate rather than productive activity (http://voxeu.org/article/great-mortgaging) This crowds out productive investment, both by the banking system itself and non-bank investors who see the potential for much higher returns on relatively tax free real estate investment. Land values also fundamentally effect the impact of monetary policy, particularly in financially liberalized economies. If a central bank lowers interest rates to try and stimulate capital investment and consumption, it is likely to simultaneously drive up land prices and the economic rent attaching to them as more credit flows in to mortgages for domestic and commercial real estate. This has a naturally perverse effect on the capital investment and consumption effects that the lowering of interest rates was intended to achieve.
As shown in Figure 2, the value of ‘dwellings’ (homes and the land underneath them) has increased by four times (or 400%) between 1995 and 2015, from £1.2 trillion to £5.5 trillion, largely due to increases in house prices rather than a change in the volume of dwellings. In contrast the forms of ‘capital’ that we associate with increases in wealth and productivity – commercial buildings, machinery, transport, Information and communications technology has grown much more slowly.
See Also : +Research:Financial Effects of Land Monopoly http://michael-hudson.com/2010/08/the-land-residual-vs-building-residual-methods-of-real-estate-valuation-2/ http://michael-hudson.com/2010/07/entrepreneurs-from-the-near-eastern-takeoff-to-the-roman-collapse/ https://erenow.com/common/the-invention-of-enterprise/4.html Ever since antiquity most surplus income and wealth has been invested in land. As modern economies grow richer and even as they “post-industrialize,” most of their surplus is invested in real property as the most desirable asset. It is financed by lenders eager to find a market for their savings and credit-creating powers. The Federal Reserve Board publishes an annual balance sheet of the economy’s assets and liabilities showing real estate to comprise two-thirds of America’s tangible assets. Land represents most of this real property – upwards of 60 percent, depending on what assessment methodology is used. This explains why most capital gains are land-value gains. They have been spurred largely by credit creation, for on the liabilities side of the balance sheet mortgage debt absorbs 70 percent of private sector bank loans. Not only the savings banks and S&Ls but also commercial bankers are essentially in the mortgage finance business. Their activities are largely responsible for asset-price inflation.
Economists don't know how to talk about capital and profits. http://evonomics.com/economists-dont-know-think-wealth-profits/ the U.S.’ National accounts does not properly take in to account capital gains and changes in household’s ‘net worth’, much of which is driven by changes in land values.
Much Economic activity is actually involved in land speculation McDonald's and other Fast Food joints are actually involved in land speculation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mQYcyxnFyE - Ray Kroc realizes he's in the real estate business. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJVj3vp-lho - How McDonald's really makes money. 64% of its franchise fees come in the form of rent. https://www.progress.org/articles/im-lovin-it The 50-story mixed-use tower planned for 50 Hudson Yards was the last big building to be announced in the new complex, and the lot under our drive-thru McDonalds was the last one acquired for it. Now, it's not like McDonald's is averse to cooking and serving burgers, and hiring people to do that. It slung burgers on this site for quite some time, possibly at a loss. It employed a total of 65 (full and part-time) employees at this restaurant. The land and building were valued by the city at $3.9 million, and the company paid an annual property tax bill of over $174,000. Why did McDonalds do that? Why, as a long-term investment. The parcel was sold this year for $35.6 million. McDonalds is -- beyond all doubt -- lovin' it.https://schalkenbach.org/file-12/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/How-The-Income-Tax-Became-A-Tax-On-Labor-4.pdf When people like Jack Kemp talk about “capital gains” today, they conjure up images of new factories and high-paying jobs. But Professor James Poterba of MIT has found that only about 1% of such gains flow from real venture capital. The rest comes from such things as antiques, fine art, and existing stock certificates; and much of the latter represent disguised land and resources. Corporations hold some75% of the real estate assets in the US, so increases in stock value often reflect underlying increases in real estate values, not job-creatingcapital. According to Dan Sullivan, mostly defunct US Steel owns more US coal than anyone else besides ConSolidated.
Land Prices Price of Urban Land https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/11/the-staggering-value-of-urban-land/544706/ http://davidalbouy.net/landvalue_index.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20190219134258/http://davidalbouy.net/landvalue_index.pdf The total value of America’s urban land is astounding, adding up to more than $25 trillion as of 2010—that’s roughly more than double the nation’s total economic output or GDP in 2006, according to a recent study by economists at the University of Illinois and the University of Michigan. Nearly half the total value of America’s urban land, 48 percent of it, is packed into just five superstar metro areas: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, with land in and around the urban center being the most valuable by far. This only covered transaction data up to 2010 and land prices have increased by over 100% in some areas between 2012-2017. In addition to excluding farmland, it may have missed some of the industrial zones on highway intersections. Price of Rural Land https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/land-use-land-value-tenure/farmland-value/ https://www.usda.gov/nass/PUBS/TODAYRPT/land0815.pdf The US department of agriculture publishes statistics related to farm real estate. There's a document here which shows changes in land value from 2006 to 2015. In 2006, farm real estate was worth about $1,700/acre, and rose to about $2,700/acre in 2015. Pasture changed from about $950/acre to about $1,300/acre over the same period. Of course, this is all rural land. The report actually separates the value of land vs. land + buildings.
https://www.usda.gov/nass/PUBS/TODAYRPT/land0817.pdf The United States farm real estate value, a measurement of the value of all land and buildings on farms, averaged $3,080 per acre for 2017, up $70 per acre (2.3 percent) from 2016values. Regional changes in the average value of farm real estate ranged from a 8.7percent increase in the Pacificregion to 1.8 percent decreasein the Northern Plainsregion. The highest farm real estate values were in the CornBelt region at $6,260 per acre. The Mountain region had the lowestfarm real estate value at $1,130 per acre.The United States cropland value remained unchanged at $4,090 per acrefrom the previous year. In the Southern Plains region, the average cropland value increased 6.0percent from the previous year. However, in the Northern Plainsregion, cropland values decreasedby 4.4percent. The United States pasture value increased by $20 per acre (1.5 percent)from 2016 values. The Deltaregion had the highest increase of 2.9 percent from 2016. The largest decrease, at 1.7 percent, was in the Corn Belt region. Price of Residential Land https://www.fhfa.gov/PolicyProgramsResearch/Research/PaperDocuments/wp1901.pdf (Source for graph is Dan Sullivan's lecture on Land Trusts. ) Price of All Land https://www.progress.org/articles/scholars-guess-how-many-in-this-market https://www.progress.org/articles/bounty-the-greatest-stat-on-earth-its-real-worth Lots of articles in this series 'bounty'. Hunting them all down is a pain. https://www.progress.org/tags/series-bounty https://www.progress.org/authors/jeffery-j-smith Larson Study: 23 Trillion https://www.bea.gov/research/papers/2015/new-estimates-value-land-united-states https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21733988-property-yields-more-shares-and-bonds-investment-returns-outstrip-economic Land increases faster than GDP. ( Still going on https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/great-affordability-crisis-breaking-america/606046/)
Piketty's Capital in the 21st century conflates land with capital. Remove the housing from capital and the return to capital is the same as labor. https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/deciphering-the-fall-and-rise-in-the-net-capital-share/
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/finalincomeviz.png Supporting the idea that Piketty conflated land with capital. https://voxeu.org/article/housing-capital-and-piketty-s-analysis https://voxeu.org/article/land-back-it-should-be-taxed-it-can-be-taxed
https://www.progress.org/articles/scholars-guess-how-many-in-this-market How much is land actually worth? https://www.aei.org/housing/land-price-indicators/ https://www.aei.org/historical-land-price-indicators/
Mitigation
Japan used Land Value Tax to reduce the price of land in the 21st century. https://scholarworks.law.ubalt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1050&=&context=ubjld&sei-redir=1&referer=https%253A%252F%252Fscholar.google.com%252Fscholar%253Frlz%253D1MDAPLA_enUS773US773%2526ctzn%253DAmerica%252FNew_York%2526apps%253Dma%252Cyt%2526biw%253D320%2526hl%253Den%2526channel%253Diss%2526client%253Dmobilesearchapp%2526v%253D71.1.241847734%2526vpa%253D2%2526wf%253Dpp1%2526gsawvi%253D1%2526gs_lp%253DEg1pcGhvbmVhcHAyLXBiGgIYACIdd2hvIG93bnMgQmFsdGltb3JlIGxhbmQgdmFsdWUyCQgAECEYoAEoATIGCAEQKygBSLExUPIIWIMlmAGyB6ABjQ2qAQkxajNqMWo2LTG4AQPoAQGAAresK5ACAJgCBagCALACAMICBxAhGKsCKAHCAggQABgWGB4oAcICBBAAKAHCAgYQABhHKAHCAgoQIRgWGB0YHigB0gIkNTVDNUZGRDYtMkRBNC00NTUyLUE1MzgtNTZCODE4MjY3OTA4oAOECMADnkXiAwQIChgA4gMECAsYAOIDBAgMGADKBAIYAIIFBAgAEAA%25253D%2526bih%253D548%2526ntyp%253D1%2526um%253D1%2526ie%253DUTF-8%2526lr%2526q%253Drelated%253A6-8qhehv2xjzHM%253Ascholar.google.com%252F#search=%22related%3A6-8qhehv2xjzHM%3Ascholar.google.com%2F%22 Japan instituted an LVT itself much more recently, in 1992. The purpose of the LVT in this case, however, was to stabilize the rapidly increasing value of property. In the twenty five years before the LVT had been implemented, property values in Japan’s largest cities had raised nearly twenty-fold. By 2013, the property values in Japan’s largest cities had fallen back down to the prices they were in 1983. The effect of this on the urban population is apparent, as there was only a 5 percent increase in the urban population from 1970 to 1990, but a 17 percent increase after the LVT was implemented from 1990 to the present day.In this instance, because the stabilization of the housing market occurred around the same time as the implementation of the LVT and the population of cities increased significantly as well, the LVT appears to have been very beneficial for Japan. https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/hi46e3/why_are_we_using_the_shoshinsha_mark_to_indicate/fweg65q/ Coincidentally, Japan has land value taxes, kind of similiar of a LVT in calculation: The fixed-asset tax is 1.4 percent and the municipal tax 0.3 percent of the “taxable value,” which is typically lower than the market price. Assessing rosenka (taxable value), is carried out by determining a price for a particular plot of land in a given area based on its relation to roads and train lines, and then using that price to determine other plots of land in the area using variables such as size, distance from amenities, etc. Pennsylvania successfully used split rate Taxation in the 20th century. +History:Pennsylvania
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/did-the-state-destroy-the-best-model-for-affordable-urban-housing/ Limited Equity Co-ops used to be a popular and successful strategy for renters to work together and avoid the pressures of urban land speculation.
Land as a Major source of inequality
This article from the economist has a chart that claims ~2012 that the top 1% held 20% of US housing wealth, and the top 10% to 1% held another 45%, the bottom 90% held the remaining 35%. (It is sourced to Saez and Zucman and I think it is derived from data in this 2014 study. They went on to do some very interesting work on how much taxes are paid by the rich versus the poor, which is begging for a georgist synthesis of the data, which Fred Harrison has done for the UK in his books 'Ricardo's Law' and 'We are Rent'.)
Thus around 2012 you had 65% of all housing wealth in the US held by the top 10%. This trend accelerated through the decade.
"The proportion of land owned by the nation’s hundred largest private landowners grew by nearly 50 percent between 2007 and 2017. In 2007, according to the Land Report, this group owned a combined 27 million acres of land, equivalent to the area of Maine and New Hampshire combined. A decade later, the 100 largest landowners had holdings of more than 40 million acres. Their holdings are now larger than the entirety of New England. Even in the vast American West, where much of the land remains in public hands, billionaires have created expansive estates that many fear will make the rest of the local population land-poor." Most of the rise in wealth among advanced economies around the world of the last two decades was due to the rise in housing wealth, and wealth inequality between nations is strongly determined by housing wealth, as well as within cities.
All this demonstrates that housing is underrated and misunderstood as a source of wealth, despite the fact that currently housing is the largest asset class in the world, and the wealth generated thereof is largely from public expenditure.
However, land as a major source of inequality due to outsize returns is a steady trend going back as far as we have data.
The failure to tax the rent of land results in the lower classes shouldering a larger portion of the burden of the state as well as lower economic growth overall. The pie is both smaller and unfairiy divided.
This is not an accident and would be remedied by taxing the unimproved value of land which would eliminate the politial incentivest to propup homeowner's property values with counterproductive policies.
LAND INEQUALITY IS WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT AND IS FUELING OTHER INEQUALITIES https://www.landcoalition.org/en/newsroom/new-report-reveals-land-inequality-worse-we-thought-and-fueling-other-inequalities/ https://www.landcoalition.org/en/uneven-ground/ IN A NEW STUDY RELEASED TODAY, RESEARCHERS SAY THAT LAND INEQUALITY IS RISING IN MOST COUNTRIES. Worse, new measures and analysis proves that land inequality is significantly higher than previously recorded, with data reporting a 41 percent increase compared to traditional census data. Historically, methods to measure land inequality excluded vital pieces of information, such as the value of land, multiple ownership and landlessness, as well as the control a person or an entity has over it. “These findings radically alter our understanding of the extent and far reaching consequences land inequality has, proving that not only is it a bigger problem than we thought but it’s undermining the stability and development of sustainable societies,” Anseeuw added. LAND INEQUALITY IS CENTRAL TO OTHER FORMS OF INEQUALITY, AND TO MANY GLOBAL CRISES AND TRENDS The report further brings new evidence to light on how tackling land inequality is imperative to effectively respond to the most pressing challenges of our times and has the potential to deliver significant positive outcomes for humanity and the planet. If not addressed and the trend continues, increasing land inequality will have significant negative consequences for all societies, on economic and social development, on the environment and on democracy and peace.Yet the authors insist that land concentration is not inevitable. “What we’re seeing is that land inequality is fundamentally a product of elite control, corporate interests, and political choices. And although the importance of land inequality is widely accepted, the tools to address it remain weakly implemented and vested interests in existing land distribution patterns, hard to shift,” said Giulia Baldinelli of ILC and co-author of the report. Nevertheless, the study finds that change is necessary and the urgency of addressing land inequality is fuelled by the same urgency with which people are demanding action on contemporary global crises. “As we move towards a post-Covid world, we will see increased pressure for fast economic gain at the expense of people and nature,” Mike Taylor, Director of the International Land Coalition Secretariat warned. Adding, “there is always, however, a more inclusive path to re-building our economies, that emphasises sustainable use of natural resources, respects human rights and addresses systemic causes of inequality.” Property Rights inequality and commons http://www.bollier.org/blog/property-rights-inequality-and-commons The Case for Universal Property https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-case-for-universal-property/ If implemented on a significant scale, universal property would inoculate the society against extreme inequality. It would provide an asset-based source for a universal basic income, not dependent on redistributive taxation. Charging for use of the sky’s carbon-absorption capacity would help stabilize the Earth’s climate by curbing emissions; similarly, financial transaction taxes would help stabilize the economy by curbing hair-trigger speculation Universal property is a bold idea that does not fit neatly into old labels. It is neither Democratic nor Republican, neither liberal nor conservative, neither socialist nor libertarian. Or rather, it is both. It would advance equality and liberty together. And by bringing everyone into the same boat as co-owners, it could help bridge the divides that keep us apart.
Why wealth is determined more by "privilege" than productivity https://evonomics.com/wealth-power-productivity-laurie-macfarlane/ The lesson here is that aggregate wealth is not simply a reflection of the process of accumulation, as theory tends to imply. It is also a reflection of the boundaries of what can and cannot be alienated, priced, bought and sold, and the power dynamics that underpin them. This is not just a historical matter. Breadtube vs Economics https://youtu.be/-vfx1kQlmOk Land's role in inequality
Stiglitz on the Origins Of Inequality https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/jstiglitz/sites/jstiglitz/files/2015 Origins of Inequality.pdf Specifically, I suggest that much of the increase in inequality is associated with the growth in rents — including land and exploitation rents (e.g., arising from monopoly power and political influence). https://evonomics.com/joseph-stiglitz-inequality-unearned-income/ Standard Economics Is Wrong. Inequality and Unearned Income Kills the Economy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg6UwAQJUVo&t=113m37s From 2:09 to around 2:13:30 He brings up George and gives an endorsement to LVT! Want to tackle inequality? Then first change our land ownership laws https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/04/tackle-inequality-land-ownership-laws https://landforthemany.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/land-for-the-many.pdf Economic Capitalization - Public goods are capitalized into land values. https://www.progress.org/articles/economic-capitalization Economic capitalization” is the conversion of a flow of income into a stock of value. This is also referred to as the present value of a future flow. Imagine a place that had a lake, but is now dry. A river starts flowing into the lake. If you measure the volume of river water per day, you would be able to measure how big the lake will be in a week. The water flow is capitalized into a stock or amount of water. If one were to sell the value of that water today, even before the lake is full, it would be the present value of the expected flow of water. As real estate is a major asset and a major cost for households and enterprise, the capitalization of territorial benefits is an important economic phenomenon. The net benefits of the public goods and civic services provided by government generate higher land rent and become capitalized into higher land values because most of the payment comes from taxes other than on that land value. A worker who is also a renter pays both higher rent and taxes for the public goods. If the worker-tenant is double-billed, someone is getting subsidized - the landowner. Owners of land obtain higher land value because their sites get services paid for by others, from taxes on wages, enterprise profits, value added, and the sale of goods. "This implicit subsidy constitutes a forced redistribution of wealth from workers to landowners. This redistribution is a major reason why wages have stagnated even while economies have kept growing. The higher rent is not recognized because most of it is masked in forms such as profits, interest, dividends, and taxes." The capitalization of benefits into land value has another consequence: much of the gains from economic expansion, due to both better technology and more investments in education and capital goods, gets captured by higher rent and land value. The increase in real estate prices during an economic boom attracts speculators who create an unsustainable bubble that then crashes and brings down with it the financial sector, as happened in 2008.a Yet, the economic textbooks ignore the capitalization of public goods into land values. The public finance tests do mention it, but do not grasp the policy implications. Economists have largely failed to include capitalization in their theorems and mathematical models (but see the note below). It goes back to the mathematization of academic economics into models of K and L, capital and labor, ignoring land for both mathematical convenience and the influence of landed interests who turned grounded classical theory into ethereal neoclassical modeling. So the public does not understand capitalization, and neither do journalists and politicians. The tax debates are minor arguments over tax rates, exemptions, deductions, credits, and alternative calculations, rather than the big issue of why we capitalize the wealthy landed interests at the expense of labor, enterprise, and the poor. Note: there have been a few scholarly articles on capitalization, such as “Land Value Capitalization in Local Public Finance,” by David A. Starrett in the Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 89, No. 2 (Apr., 1981), pp. 306-327.
http://davidalbouy.net/housingexpenditures.pdf Since 1970, housing's relative price, share of expenditure, and ``unaffordability'' have all grown. We estimate housing demand using a novel compensated framework over space and an uncompensated framework over time. Our specifications pass tests imposed by rationality and household mobility. Housing demand is income and price inelastic, and appears to fall with household size. We provide a numerical non-homothetic constant elasticity of substitution utility function for improved quantitative modeling. An ideal cost-of-living index demonstrates that the poor have been disproportionately impacted by rising relative rents, which have greatly amplified increases in real income inequality.
http://neweconomics.org/2018/04/broken-land-market/
source: Reference: Rethinking the economics of land and housing, Ryan-Collins, Lloyd and Macfarlane
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/12/wealth-inequality-reasons-richest-global-gap The tax code George Osborne and Gordon Brown are the chief architects of a tax code that is now the longest in the world – in excess of 10m words and 21,000 pages. (Too long by about 20,500 pages, I’d say). The few have the resources to find the loopholes, of which there are many, and exploit them. The many don’t, so end up paying more on a proportional basis. Do we really need 12.5 times the number of words in the Bible to explain how much tax people should pay? Income tax If you have nothing, the only way you can narrow the gap between you and those at the top is by working, but you are constantly and heavily taxed on your labour. The wealth of those at the top, meanwhile, doesn’t derive from their salaries, but from the appreciation in price of their companies, their real estate, their bonds and so on, which largely go untaxed, unless they sell (so most don’t). Our society is geared to owning assets. Hard work and productivity are penalised. Successive governments claim to be “supporting hardworking families”. Really? Don’t tax labour so heavily, then. Tax something else – such as land. Quantitative easing Money printed as part of quantitative easing (£435bn in the UK and counting) is created out of nothing. It goes straight into the financial sector, pushing up the prices of financial assets. Great for those who own said assets, or work in related sectors, but not for most people. Who actually voted for quantitative easing and bailouts anyway? No one. Central banks are unelected bodies. Debt-based money Here’s a little known fact: banks create money when they lend. Excluding QE, 97% of money has been created through lending. When somebody borrows money – even just by spending on a credit card – new money is created. No wonder our economy is so geared around finance. The more money there is, the higher prices will rise. But this doesn’t happen evenly. Prices rise first closest to where new money is created. By the time this newly created money has trickled down to everyone else, prices may have risen, but wages usually haven’t. If you own the assets or operate in the sectors that have benefited from all this newly created money – the financial sector and the London property market – you’ve made spectacular gains. Otherwise not. The decline in the purchasing power of money For a host of different reasons, the purchasing power of money has fallen by 99% in the past 100 years. That’s an average decline of 5% a year. Wages have not risen by the same amount. Those who rely on their salaries to get by have suffered an inexorable erosion of their wealth. Those who own assets have made good. All of these causes of inequality are within the power of government to put right. Ultimately wealth is created by hard work and endeavour, not by reallocation and redistribution. Yet we penalise labour and subsidise both debt and the ownership of assets. All that is required is a level playing field for everyone. Honest money and a simpler tax system, which doesn’t pander to special interest groups, would fix most of the above. Zero interest-rate policies When we suppress interest rates, we effectively lower the cost of debt. We might associate debt with poverty, but cheap debt is in fact a luxury of wealthy corporations, families and governments. And they’re the ones who benefit most when interest rates are kept low. Cheap debt just encourages taking on more debt, which ultimately leads to higher asset prices, which those prudent folk who avoided excess debt (or were unable to borrow) must now incur. Why are we subsidising debt, anyway? Not measuring inflation properly In the 47 years since 1971, the money supply has increased by 67 times, growing at around 11.5% a year. The Bank of England uses a measure of inflation called CPI, which tracks the prices of certain everyday consumer goods, to set interest rates. But CPI only measures the effects of around 10% of this newly created money. It ignores property and financial assets, where 77% of newly created money has ended up, so prices have risen unchecked. It’s one reason we have seen such runaway house price inflation in recent decades. Great if you own property or financial assets. Not so great if you don’t. Government subsidies We tend to measure a subsidy’s success in terms of the benefits gained by those who receive it. Rarely do we consider the unseen costs and unintended consequences. For example, help to buy was meant to help young housebuyers; instead, it became a cash cow for building companies, and pushed house prices further out of reach for those not yet on the housing ladder. Housing benefit is meant to help the poorest; yet it pushes up the cost of renting and lines the pockets of landlords. However well-intentioned, subsidies create special interest groups, who then lobby for more subsidy. Even something like agricultural subsidy has gone wrong. Landowners are actually paid to own farmland and can avoid inheritance tax on it. So investors pile into farmland, prices become unaffordable for local farmers and the market is distorted. It’s a straight transfer of wealth from the taxpayer to the landowner. Planning laws Like the tax code, planning laws are so onerous that only the few have the resources to navigate them. Thus housebuilding has mostly become the preserve of a few large corporations. I’d love to build my own house. Wouldn’t you? Tough luck.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-02/land-is-underrated-as-a-source-of-wealth http://markwadsworth.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/deadweight-loss-of-excess-inequality.html
How Land Disappeared from Economic Theory http://evonomics.com/josh-ryan-collins-land-economic-theory/ Indeed, there is good argument that as economies mature, the demand for land relative to other consumer goods increases. Land is a ‘positional good’, the desire for which is related to one’s position in society vis a vis others and thus not subject to diminishing marginal returns like other factors. As technological developments drive down the costs of other goods, so competition over the most prized locational space rises and eats up a greater and greater share of people’s income as Adair Turner has recently argued. A recent study of 14 advanced economies found that 81% of house price increases between 1950 and 2012 can be explained by rising land prices with the remainder attributable to increases in construction costs Ricardo may have been right. https://voxeu.org/article/home-prices-1870 "Our results have potentially important implications for the much-debated long-run trends in the distributions of income and wealth (Piketty and Zucman 2014).1 We offer a lens for reinterpreting Ricardo’s famous principle of scarcity. Ricardo (1817) argued that in the long run, economic growth disproportionally profits landlords as the owners of the fixed factor. Since land is highly unequally distributed across the population, market economies produce ever-rising levels of inequality. Writing in the 19th century, Ricardo was mainly concerned with the price of agricultural land, and reasoned that as population growth pushes up the price of corn, the land rent and the land price would continuously increase. In the 21st century, we may be more concerned with the price of housing services and residential land, but the mechanism is similar. The decline in transport costs kept the price of residential land constant until the mid-20th century. The price surge in the past half-century could be an indication that Ricardo might have been right after all" (See also the articles in the history section about Technological impact of declining Transport Costs) The reasons for this may well be political. Mason Gaffney, an American land economist and scholar of Henry George, has argued that John Bates Clark and his followers received substantial financial support from corporate and landed interests who were determined to prevent George’s theories gaining credibility out of concerns that their wealth would be wittled away via a land tax. In contrast, theories of land rent and taxation never found an academic home. In addition, George, primarily a campaigner and journalist, never managed to forge an allegiance with American socialists who were more focused on taxing the profits of the captains of industry and the financial sector. The result was the burden of taxation came to fall upon capital (corporation tax) and labour (income tax) rather than land. A final factor preventing theories of land rent taking off the U.S. may have been the simple fact that at the beginning of the 20th century, land scarcity and fixity was perhaps less a political issue in the still expanding U.S. than in Europe, were a land value tax came closer to being adopted.
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2015/04/04/the-paradox-of-soil Economists studying the issue generally reckon that rising housing costs are a product of the rising cost of land. David Albouy of the University of Illinois and Gabriel Ehrlich of America’s Congressional Budget Office reckon that in America land accounts for a third of total housing costs, and close to half in some metropolitan areas. A high share of land in housing costs results in the creation of large rents for landowners. If regulatory limits on building heights and density were relaxed, fewer plots of land would be needed to satisfy a given level of demand. That would reduce the rents collected by landowners, since any uptick in demand could quickly be met by new development. Just as soaring agricultural productivity led to a decline in the relative economic power of rural landowners in the 19th and 20th centuries, the relaxation of strict limits on development would lead to a decline in property wealth relative to the economy as a whole. More of the gains of economic activity would flow to workers and investors. Instead building regulations keep urban-land productivity low, and the costs are staggering. A 2005 study by Mr Glaeser and Raven Saks, of America’s Federal Reserve, and Joseph Gyourko, of the University of Pennsylvania, attempted to derive the share of property costs attributable to regulatory limits on supply. In 1998 this “shadow tax”, as they call it, was about 20% in Washington, DC, and Boston and about 50% in San Francisco and Manhattan. Matters have almost certainly got worse since then. Similar work by Paul Cheshire and Christian Hilber, of the London School of Economics, estimated that in the early 2000s this regulatory shadow tax was roughly 300% in Milan and Paris, 450% in the City of London, and 800% in its West End. The lion’s share of the value of commercial real estate in Europe’s most economically important cities is thus attributable to rules that make building difficult. One may find it hard to sympathise with Mayfair hedge funds facing high rents. But the net effect of these costs is felt more by the poor than by the rich. Take American homeowners. The fact that 60% of households own property might seem to suggest that rising house prices and inflated land values were good for a large swathe of the middle class. Yet Edward Wolff of New York University notes that the middle class enjoyed much less of a boost to wealth because of an accompanying rise in mortgage debt (see chart 3). Meanwhile poorer Americans, who rent their homes, experienced soaring housing prices as a large and sustained increase in their cost of living. According to data gathered by Robert Shiller, of Yale University, the inflation-adjusted cost of building new housing in America is roughly the same now as it was in the 1980s. The inflation-adjusted cost of buying a new home, by contrast, has risen by 30% over the same period (during the property bubble of the 2000s house prices climbed a great deal further before falling back). Individual cities have experienced even larger increases. From 1993 to 2013 prices in Boston and San Francisco rose by 60% in real terms
See: https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/SaezZucman2015.pdf Wealth Inequality in the United States since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data
Housing as an inequality engine.
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/04/is-housing-inequality-the-main-driver-of-economic-inequality/557984/ A growing body of research suggests that inequality in the value of Americans’ homes is a major factor—perhaps the key factor—in the country’s economic divides. Ultimately, the study concludes that the rise in both housing wealth and housing inequality stems mainly from the increase in the value of land. In other research, Albouy found that the value of America’s urban land was $25 trillion in 2010, roughly double the nation’s 2016 GDP. But here’s the kicker: The main catalyst of housing inequality, according to the study, comes from the growing gap within cities and metro areas, not between them. The graph below shows the differences in housing inequality between “commuting zones”—geographic areas that share a labor market—over time. In it, you can see that inequality varies sharply within commuting zones (marked “CZ”) while it remains more or less constant between them. In other words, the spatial inequality within metros is what drives housing inequality. Factors like safety, schools, and access to employment and local amenities lead individual actors to value one neighborhood over the next.
https://www.fresheconomicthinking.com/2018/12/solving-housing-supply-mystery.html Instead of housing supply responding to prices, it responds to the rate of return of different asset classes. In this world, the notion of a static equilibrium seems to make little sense if the rebalancing of portfolios into new housing feeds back into prices. Both prices and the rate of new supply move together until the system runs out of new buyers. What seemed in the boom to be a shortage of land and housing suddenly becomes a flood as expectations of high returns vanish. Just ask anyone in Ireland or Spain about this. If you try and understand housing supply in terms of the standard single-period static supply and demand model you will struggle to make sense of housing. In this static model world, every opportunity for housing construction is already taken up, since it compresses all future time into a single period. If it could be profitable to build a house in ten years time, then the model says it is already built! Once you break free of this static view and add time to your thinking, housing supply makes a lot more sense. Landowners can choose not only how densely to develop housing on their land, but also when to develop. After all, if the price of the land is rising quickly, why would I develop today when I could make more money by holding the land vacant and developing more housing later? When you start thinking dynamically the price cycle and the supply of housing become tightly linked. I want to demonstrate briefly how dynamic balance sheet allocation decisions make sense of housing supply mystery with a simple example. (See detailed balance sheet decision tree in linked article.) 1.) The decision to build a new house on a piece of land is not a production output decision but an irreversible capital allocation decision (i.e. you can’t easily ‘unbuild’ the house next year if it is the wrong decision to build it today). 2.) Prices and Supply track together - Rising prices encourage the conversion of land and cash to housing but also encourage the conversion of cash directly to housing. This mostly occurs by buying up the existing homes and in the process bidding up prices. 3.) Zoning - In short, it makes keeping land vacant relatively more attractive than converting it to new housing. https://www.fresheconomicthinking.com/2018/04/delay-or-develop-what-really-determines.html
Pinched: Have the Boomers Pinched their children's future? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuXzvjBYW8A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9kYLPbOyQA (Around 13:48 he says it completely0 Boomer wealth advantage is because incomes no longer outpace rents in high wage cities. Young People are less moblie due to rents and can't take advantage of higher wage locations due to mobility Because Housing is so expensive fewer young people are homeowners. Young people have less space and consume less. Home prices SURGE but benefit older at expense of newer. How Housing became the engine of inequality https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/magazine/how-homeownership-became-the-engine-of-american-inequality.html While many Americans assume that most poor families live in subsidized housing, the opposite is true; nationwide, only one in four households that qualifies for rental assistance receives it. Most are like Diaz, struggling without government help in the private rental market, where housing costs claim larger and larger chunks of their income.
Can America Fix its Housing Crisis? https://thenib.com/can-america-fix-its-housing-crisis Illustration of forces and effects of land inequality
The Great Affordability Crisis Breaking America In one of the best decades the American economy has ever recorded, families were bled dry. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/great-affordability-crisis-breaking-america/606046/ The price of housing represents the most acute part of this crisis. In metro areas such as the Bay Area, Seattle, and Boston, severe supply shortages have led to soaring prices—millions of low- and middle-income families are no longer able to purchase centrally located homes. The median asking price for a single-family home in San Francisco has reached $1.6 million; even with today’s low interest rates, that would require a monthly mortgage payment of roughly $6,000, assuming that a family puts down the standard 20 percent. In Manhattan, listings for sale now ask an average of nearly $1,800 per square foot. The housing cost crises in the Bay Area and New York might be the country’s most obscene. But the problem is national, driven by a combination of stagnant wages, restrictive building codes, and underinvestment in construction, among other trends. Home prices are rising faster than wages in roughly 80 percent of American metro regions. In 2018, housing affordability declined in every one of the 160-some urban areas analyzed by the National Association of Realtors, save for Decatur, Illinois. Rising prices and housing shortages are squeezing families in Reno, Minneapolis, and Phoenix. The problem now even extends to rural areas, where income growth has lagged in the post-recession period. A recent report by the Pew Charitable Trusts found “sizable” increases in the number of households spending half or more of their income on housing in rural counties across the country. The housing crisis is hitting Bertie County, North Carolina, and Irion County, Texas, too.* One central effect of the housing-cost crisis has been to turn the United States into a country of renters. The homeownership rate has fallen from a peak of nearly 70 percent in the mid-aughts to under 65 percent today; the numbers are more acute for Millennials, whose homeownership rate is 8 percentage points lower than that of their parents at the same age. Unable to buy, roughly 3.5 million younger families have kept renting—delaying the Millennial and Gen X cohorts’ wealth accumulation, thus consigning them to worse net-worth trajectories for the rest of their lives. And renting, for many families, is not affordable, either: Nearly half of renters are facing uncomfortable monthly bills, and the cost of renting has risen faster than renters’ incomes for a full 20 years now.
New American Housing Crisis for low wage workers. https://newrepublic.com/article/154618/new-american-homeless-housing-insecurity-richest-cities Atlanta, the third-fastest-growing metropolitan area in the country, is illustrative. For the city’s working poor, there’s an inverse relationship between their ability to remain housed and Atlanta’s much-celebrated renaissance. Between 2012 and 2016, the city’s low-income housing stock declined by 5 percent each year, to the point that today, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, there are only 25 affordable rental units for every 100 poor families in the Atlanta area who need them. (The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development defines affordable as costing no more than 30 percent of a household’s income.) A recent report by the Brookings Institution found that Atlanta’s income inequality is the most extreme in the nation; another ranked it fifth among places most intensely gentrifying; and a 2019 analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank ranked Atlanta 360th out of 381 cities in terms of economic mobility. To truly grasp the severity of the crisis, however, it’s necessary to turn to a somewhat obscure study—The Worst Case Housing Needs Report to Congress—released biennially by HUD. Last published in 2017, the report tracks the number of extremely low-income renting families who (a) do not receive housing assistance and (b) spend more than half of their income on rent, live in grossly inadequate conditions, or both. In Atlanta, that figure was 127,000, or 49 percent of all very low-income renters—roughly the same proportion as San Francisco, and 6 points higher than the national percentage. Nevertheless, nine out of ten apartments built in 2017 were classified as luxury units. Outrageous rents would be less alarming if wages were increasing at a comparable rate. But the opposite is true. Nationwide, the hourly earnings of high-wage workers rose 41 percent between 1979 and 2013; those of middle-wage workers grew only 6 percent. The pay for low-wage workers, meanwhile, decreased by 5 percent. Contrast these figures to the 138 percent annual wage growth among the top 1 percent of earners. Factoring in the cost of housing only darkens the picture. Today, there is not a single county in the United States where someone making minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment. In Atlanta, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s annual Out of Reach report, the “housing wage” needed to pay for a modest two-bedroom unit is $21.27 an hour. (Georgia’s minimum wage is $5.15 an hour.) In Boston, a tenant earning minimum wage would have to log 141 hours a week to afford the same residence. In San Francisco, it’s 203 hours, or the equivalent of five full-time jobs. Once upon a time, mass homelessness did not exist in the United States. The population of people without stable living situations periodically surged, but these waves were temporary, subsiding as the economy improved. The phenomenon we now know as homelessness—pervasive, unremarkable, seemingly intractable—arose only in the 1980s. What had been anomalous suddenly became “the common misery of millions,” observed the writer and activist Jonathan Kozol in his 1988 book Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America. Set in a towering New York shelter that Kozol likened to an urban refugee camp, the book sought to excavate the causes of this great displacement. Kozol refused the dominant explanations, all of which emphasized some mix of individual and group pathology: teenage pregnancy, mental illness, drugs, a “culture of poverty.” He offered a different view. In 1970, the United States had a surplus of 300,000 affordable rental homes; under President Reagan, federal spending on low-income housing plummeted from $32 billion to $7 billion. (“We’re getting out of the housing business. Period,” said a top HUD official at the time.) Affordable units evaporated, and with them many of the legal safeguards allowing poor tenants to stay in the relative few that remained. Kozol condensed his findings into a single italicized sentence: “The cause of homelessness,” he wrote, “is lack of housing.” Is this Related to the loss of taxation of land rent and loss of depreciation of real investment pointed out by Gaffney? http://www.masongaffney.org/workpapers/Capital_Gains_and_Future_of_Free_Enterprise.pdf http://www.georgistjournal.org/2016/08/01/tax-treatment-of-land-income/ Or the Debt / Investment shift away from productive enterprise and towards financial products pointed out here? https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2018/nov/credit-where-its-due https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwake/2019/03/15/the-debt-shift-theory-of-the-great-financial-crisis-and-the-great-real-estate-bubble/#c1a00fc19d01 Inequality within major american metro areas has ballooned since the 1980s . . .right around when these shifts took place. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/02/upshot/wealth-poverty-divide-american-cities.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
Last year (2018). . . HUD reported a 23 percent decline in the number of families with children experiencing homelessness since 2007. The only problem, according to critics, is that HUD’s definition of “homeless,” and thus the scope of its Point-in-Time count, is severely limited, restricted to people living in shelters or on the streets. Everyone else—those crammed into apartments with others, or living in cars or hotels—is rendered doubly invisible: at once hidden from sight and disregarded by the official reporting. . . In 2016, Dworkin and her colleagues began conducting their own survey of Chicago’s homeless population, expanding it beyond the HUD census to include families doubled up with others. Their total was twelve times that of the Point-in-Time count: 82,212 versus 6,786. “The idea that these families aren’t ‘actually’ homeless because they’re not in shelters is absurd,” Dworkin told me. “Oftentimes the shelters are full, or there simply are no family shelters—in which case, all these people are essentially abandoned by the system.” Questions: how to view this in light of the study that says gentrification doesn't have a bad impact even on renters b/c they move a lot anyway? https://www.bloombergquint.com/onweb/2018/06/21/u-s-homes-prices-least-affordable-in-almost-a-decade U.S. Homes Prices Least Affordable in Almost a Decade https://www.cbpp.org/blog/rents-have-risen-more-than-incomes-in-nearly-every-state-since-2001 Rents have risen more than incomes in nearly every state since 2001 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mikekoprowski/sky-high-rents-2020-issue As of 2019E:
Since 1960, renters’ incomes have increased by only 5% while rents have risen 61%. Whoever wants to be president should say how they’ll solve this crisis. Out of over 3,000 counties in the nation, there are only 22 where a full-time worker earning minimum wage can afford a modest one-bedroom rental, and there are no counties where they can afford a modest two-bedroom. Nationally, there are only 37 available and affordable homes for every 100 extremely low-income renter households. American landlords derive more profit from renters in low-income neighborhoods https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/03/housing-rent-landlords-poverty-desmond-inequality-research/585265/ It is a mistake, Desmond and Wilmers argue, to see slums as a byproduct of the modern city, rundown areas that occur by accident. Instead, they contend that the slum has long been a “prime moneymaker” for those who profit from land scarcity, racial segregation, and deferred maintenance. “If labor exploitation is understood to be getting paid less than the market value of what one produces,” they write, “we can extend this definition to the housing market by operationalizing exploitation as being overcharged relative to the market value of what one purchases, paying more for less.” Ultimately, they find consistent evidence that the poor, and especially the minority poor, experience the highest rates of housing exploitation. In their most basic formulations, they find that renters in high-poverty neighborhoods experience levels of exploitation that are more than double those of renters in neighborhoods with lower levels of poverty. Neighborhoods with a poverty rate of less than 15 percent have an exploitation rate of 10 percent—meaning that rents cover 10 percent of the actual cost of that housing. (In other words, the actual cost of that rental housing can be paid off in 10 years.) But in high-poverty neighborhoods, those where 50 to 60 percent of residents live in poverty, the exploitation rate is 25 percent, meaning that 25 percent of the value of the property is paid back in a single year of rent. The Wealth Inequality of Nations https://stonecenter.gc.cuny.edu/research/the-wealth-inequality-of-nations/ https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/6msuf/ https://fabianpfeffer.com/wp-content/uploads/PfefferWaitkus2021.pdf April 2021 Fabian T. Pfeffer, Nora Waitkus Comparative research on income inequality has produced several coherent frameworks to study the institutional determinants of income stratification. In contrast, no such framework and much less empirical evidence exist to explain cross-national differences in wealth inequality. This situation is particularly lamentable as cross-national patterns of inequality in wealth diverge sharply from those in income. We seek to pave the way for new explanations of cross-national differences in wealth inequality by tracing them to the influence of different wealth components. Drawing on the literatures on financialization and housing, we argue that housing equity should be the central building block of the comparative analysis of wealth inequality. Using harmonized data on fifteen countries included in the Luxembourg Wealth Study (LWS), we first demonstrate a lack of association between national levels of income and wealth inequality and concentration. Using decomposition approaches, we then estimate the degree to which national levels of wealth inequality and concentration relate to cross-national differences in wealth portfolios and the distribution of specific asset components. Considering the role of housing equity, financial assets, non-housing real assets, and non-housing debt, we reveal that cross-national variation in wealth inequality and concentration is centrally determined by the distribution of housing equity. While simple indicators of home ownership rates, typically used to capture the overall importance of housing assets in a given country, suggest that broader access to home ownership may dampen wealth inequality and concentration, the overall distribution of housing equity, of which the prevalence of home ownership is just one aspect, is the central element accounting for overall wealth inequality. A country’s distribution of housing equity explains its overall level of wealth inequality and concentration to a substantial degree, including both the outlying position of the United States as well as the overall variation across many different countries. This is not to say that the strong concentration of financial assets and business equity at the top of the wealth distribution in most countries would be unimportant. In fact, a focus on financial assets and business equity is likely central to the understanding of elite closure and the continued and accelerating wealth accumulation of the top one percent (Piketty 2014; Carney and Nason 2018). But, based on the evidence presented here, our understanding of wealth inequality among the remaining 99 percent relies on increased attention to the structure and dynamics of housing and mortgage markets." It seems unfortunate that one of the most ambitious theoretical and empirical studies on the determinants of wealth inequality, Piketty’s Capital (2014), also mostly disregards the role of housing as a driver of wealth inequality (see also Bonnet et al. 2014; Fuller et al. 2019; Rognlie 2015), and the proposed “rule” of growing wealth inequality (r > g) at best discounts the importance of a careful analysis of the institutional determinants of wealth inequality (see also Acemoglu and Robinson 2015). An alternative, theoretically ambitious effort that focuses on the role of housing may, instead, naturally align with the rapidly expanding literature on financialization that has forcefully argued for the central role of mortgage lending. At the backdrop of the findings presented here, one way to bring the literature on financialization and the literature on wealth into closer conversation would be to establish a clear empirical link between different lending regimes and the structure of national housing markets. Doing so would also promise to ameliorate the surprising disconnect between the scholarships on wealth and debt (see also Dwyer 2018).
https://nypost.com/2019/12/25/how-america-is-reverting-back-to-the-feudal-age/ The proportion of land owned by the nation’s hundred largest private landowners grew by nearly 50 percent between 2007 and 2017. In 2007, according to the Land Report, this group owned a combined 27 million acres of land, equivalent to the area of Maine and New Hampshire combined. A decade later, the 100 largest landowners had holdings of more than 40 million acres. Their holdings are now larger than the entirety of New England. Even in the vast American West, where much of the land remains in public hands, billionaires have created expansive estates that many fear will make the rest of the local population land-poor.
How the obsession with homeownership ruins the economy | The Economist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkVEt5tC2xU&feature=emb_title a.) Subsidies to homeownership have propped up the price b.) High homeownership rates correlate with restrictive zoning to protect investments. c.) High homeownership rates are correlated with higher unemployment. (Less likely to move to find another job) Those with mortgage debt are 30% less likely to become an entrepreneur. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcEjSvzkehk ~ 6:01:00 d.) Homeownership is weakly correlated with development. Singapore 91% but #9 on human development index. Romania 96% but # 52 Switzerland 38% but https://github.com/larsiusprime/georgism/pull/2 e.) AFter taking all costs into account (taxes, insurance, broker fees etc) , Renting and Homeownership are about the same. 'Shaking the Foundations': Full Housing Report From Economist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcEjSvzkehk Starts at 5:22:46
A history How housing became the world’s biggest asset class https://www.economist.com/special-report/2020/01/16/how-housing-became-the-worlds-biggest-asset-class https://outline.com/EfEz3V Over the past 70 years housing has undergone a remarkable transformation. Until the mid-20th century house prices across the rich world were fairly stable (see chart). From then on, however, they boomed both relative to the price of other goods and services and relative to incomes. Rents went up, too. The Joint Centre for Housing Studies of Harvard University finds that the median American rent payment rose 61% in real terms between 1960 and 2016 while the median renter’s income grew by 5%. In the 18th century farmland was the world’s single-biggest asset class. In the 19th century the factories used to power the Industrial Revolution took the number-one spot. Now it is housing (see chart, below). In a research paper Òscar Jordà, Alan Taylor and Moritz Schularick describe the second half of the 20th century as “the great mortgaging”. In 1940-2000 mortgage credit as a share of GDP across the rich world more than doubled. More people clambered onto the “housing ladder”. America’s home-ownership rate rose from around 45% to 70%; Britain’s went from 30% to 70%. Why did the rich world turn against new construction? The post-war rise in home ownership may have had something to do with it. In 2001 William Fischel of Harvard University proposed his “homevoter hypothesis”. The thinking runs that owner-occupiers have an incentive to resist development in their local area, since doing so helps preserve the value of their property. As home ownership rises, therefore, housing construction might be expected to fall.
Despite the fact that land has a high long term return, it is usually a terrible investment for the poor. http://cityobservatory.org/homeownership-a-failed-wealth-creation-strategy/ Housing can be a good investment if you buy at the right time, buy in the right place, get a fair deal on financing, and aren’t excessively vulnerable to market swings. Unfortunately the market for home-ownership is structured in such a way as to assure that low-income and minority buyers meet none of these conditions. For these Americans, there’s no guarantee that homeownership builds wealth; in fact, tends to be a risky proposition that often produces financial hardship. First, you have to buy at the right time. As the experience of the last housing bubble showed, low-income and minority buyers came into the market most strongly as lending standards were relaxed, relatively late in the cycle. Those who bought in 2001 (when the market was depressed) fared very differently that those who bought in 2006 (at the height of the bubble). Easy credit nominally made homes more affordable, but also drew ever more borrowers into the market to bid up the prices of homes until the bubble popped. Because of this inherent quality of the credit cycle, the poorest borrowers are drawn into the market at the worst time to buy—when prices are at their highest. Second, you have to buy in the right place. Opportunities for home appreciation vary enormously, not only by region of the country, but by neighborhood within metro areas. Ethnic minorities tend to buy in neighborhoods that have lower rates of home price appreciation. Black and Hispanic households experienced bigger declines in home values as the housing bubble collapsed, and a slower rebound as it recovered, leaving them worse off that the typical white homeowner. And that’s not a result of Black and Hispanic buyers being poor judges of neighborhood quality: In segregated housing markets, the behavior of whites to avoid Black and Hispanic neighborhoods means that it’s much more difficult for those communities to see consistently rising home values. Third, you have to get a good deal on credit. The evidence is that low income borrowers and ethnic minorities pay, on average, higher interest rates. A 2006 study for HUD found that after controlling for household, property and loan characteristics, black households pay interest rates that are 21 to 42 basis points higher than whites, and hispanics pay rates than are 13 to 15 basis points higher. Federally guaranteed home mortgages must pay fees based on their riskiness, as measured by the mortgage’s loan-to-value ratio and the borrower’s credit score. Because minority buyers tend to have lower down payments and worse credit scores, it’s estimated that they pay guarantee fees that are 50 percent higher on average than white buyers. In addition, we know that low income and minority borrowers were the targets of predatory lenders. If you pay more for your mortgage, that raises the cost and lowers the returns to homeownership. Finally, in order to build wealth with housing, you have to have the ability to weather economic cycles. Low income and minority families often have limited financial resources beyond the equity in their homes and therefore are poorly positioned to cope with financial setbacks—loss of a job, a major medical expense or home repair—and missing mortgage payments can quickly push them into default. And highly leveraged home buyers (who get 90% or greater mortgages) are vulnerable to lose their entire investment in the face of even a modest decline in home prices. As Atif Mian and Amir Sufi have documented, conventional US mortgage loans are a risky, one-sided bet for borrowers.
Gentrification is good or at least not bad for even the original residents. (Georgist rent increases thus won't disrupt neighborhoods) http://cityobservatory.org/how-gentrification-benefits-long-time-residents-of-low-income-neighborhoods/ It is probably too much to ask, but what the data show, is that for many residents and neighborhoods, gentrification is a good thing. It raises property values for long-time homeowners, increasing their wealth. It doesn’t appear to be associated with rent increases for less educated renters who remain. Poverty rates decline, and objective changes in neighborhood characteristics–notably greater income mixing–are associated with higher levels of inter-generational mobility for kids growing up in such neighborhoods. In addition, the data show that poor neighborhoods that don’t gentrify steadily deteriorate on these measures. Implicit in much of the popular discussion and press coverage of gentrification is the assumption that neighborhoods that don’t gentrify will stay the same–but they don’t. Things get worse. That’s the relevant story for many places, and its simply not reported. http://cityobservatory.org/the-devaluation-of-black-neighborhoods-part-1/ Because some white households may be much less averse to having black neighbors, some of what we see as gentrification may be propelled by the substantially lower cost of housing in majority black neighborhoods. https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-left-nimby-canon Noah smith goes over research showing more 'market rate' housing lowers rents.
I will place suggested tags/categories both on top of and beside the links.
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Misc
Land Value Tax and Farming Parts 1, 2, and 3 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw2WENjbuO_C_9cXkLU1iKg (videos, Dan Sullivan, Youtube, Farming, Land Value Tax, small business)
A Philosophy for a Fair Society https://cooperative-individualism.org/hudson-michael_a-philosophy-for-a-fair-society-1994.htm (authors: Michael Hudson, George J. Miller, and Kris Feder, Answers to Critics, history, Georgist Paradigm, book)
BETÆNKNING VEDRØRENDE FULD GRUNDSKYLD: AFGIVET DEN 13. OKTOBER 1954 AF DEN AF FINANSMINISTEREN NEDSATTE KOMMISSION TIL UNDERSØGELSE AF SPØRGSMÅL I FORBINDELSE MED GENNEMFØRELSE AF FULD GRUNDSKYLD https://zoltantamasvajda.github.io/report_concerning_the_full_land_tax/ (Denmark, Government Commission Report, Full LVT, auto-translate)
Dan Sullivan - Co-operative land trusts and the social economy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1t16FoeH9Y (Dan Sullivan, Sweden, Swedish, Community land trusts, video, presentation, Georgism).
The up-to-date primer : a first book of lessons for little political economists ; in words of one syllable with pictures https://ia600903.us.archive.org/6/items/uptodateprimerfi00beng/uptodateprimerfi00beng.pdf (author: J.W. Bengovch, children's book, political-economy, primer)
Henry George's Legacy in Economic Thought https://eh.net/book_reviews/henry-georges-legacy-in-economic-thought/#:~:text=George%20tried%20to%20explain%20the,theory%20and%20Ricardo's%20rent%20theory. (editor: John Laurent, essay collection, Terence Dwyer, history, Australia, New Zealand, Answers to Critics, anti-georgist, Thomas Huxley, Duke of Argyll, evolutionary economics, Malthus, Malthusianism, Leo Tolstoy, proprietary community, environmentalism, land value uplift capture)
Utopia by Taxation: Frank Stephens and the Single Tax Community of Arden, Delaware https://www.cooperative-individualism.org/taylor-mark_utopia-by-taxation-arden-2002-apr.pdf (Arden, Delaware, United States, proprietary community, Frank Stephens)
Transport infrastructure and land value uplift https://www.bitre.gov.au/sites/default/files/is_069.pdf (Land value uplift capture, Henry George, land value tax, Australia, infrastructure, tax increment funding, Betterment tax, transaction taxes, Joint development)
Land-Value Taxation: The Equitable Source of Public Finance https://books.google.ca/books?id=_XmTDAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false (editor: K.C. Wenzer, Georgist, Georgism, essay collection, William Vickrey, Harry Gunnison Brown, Mason Gaffney, Nicolaus Tideman, Robert V Andelson, Fred Foldvary, Alanna Hartzok, Henry George, land value tax, split-rate tax, Pennsylvania, agriculture, farming, farmers, land speculation, History, British history, ethics)
The Henry George Rule, Optimal Population, and Interregional Equity https://www.jstor.org/stable/134651 (author: John M. Hartwick, Henry George Theorem, Optimal Population Size, Interregional Equity)
The Henry George Rule, Scale Economies and Optimal Land Use https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/275147?ln=en (author: John M. Hartwick, Henry George Theorem, scale economies, optimal land use)
Classical liberalism and modern political economy in Denmark https://static-curis.ku.dk/portal/files/193395672/Kurrild_KlitgaardSept2015_1_.pdf (author: Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard, Denmark, Justice Party, Georgism, classical liberalism, free-market liberalism, history, Knud Tholstrup)
Tax increment financing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_increment_financing (tax increment financing, Wikipedia, land value uplift capture)
Nature, Environment and Political Economy https://rest.neptune-prod.its.unimelb.edu.au/server/api/core/bitstreams/b994d338-a560-5274-89a9-e9272b9ed8a4/content (author: Guido Erreygers, history of economic thought, nature, environment, political economy, adam smith, William Petty, Richard Cantillon, Physiocrats, Quesnay, David Ricardo, Johann Heinrich Von Thünen, Malthus, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Henry George, William Stanley Jevons)
Ain't No Taxing High Enough: Using Land Value Taxation to Combat the Nation's Rental Affordability Crisis https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1663&context=lawineq (author: Robert Stephen Earnest, land value tax, rental housing)
Land Value Taxation: An Underutilized Complement to Smart Growth Policies https://www.glenneweeks.com/MarkSpeirsFinalPaper12-20.pdf (author: Mark Speirs, Masters Thesis, Land Value Tax, Smart Growth)
Land Value Taxation: A Spatially Explicit Economic Experiment with Endogenous Institutions https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11146-021-09875-9 (land value tax, sprawl, academic article)
Land rents: the gold carat of job creation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWA8NGb5OgI&list=PLB7CBD04BC1DA8320 (author: Peter Meakin, South Africa, Land Value Tax, Agriculture, Farming)
WHAT TO DO WHEN MAIN STREET IS LEGAL AGAIN: REGIONAL LAND VALUE TAXATION AS A NEW URBANIST TOOL https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=9516&context=penn_law_review (author: NATHAN FARRIS, sprawl, New Urbanism, Urbanism, Regionalism, farmland, land value tax)
It’s the land, stupid! Georgism and how taxing land, not labour, could change the world https://web.archive.org/web/20220610035424/https://inews.co.uk/news/its-the-land-stupid-georgism-and-how-taxing-land-not-labour-could-change-the-world-1678385 (author: Tom Chivers, article, introductory)
Joel's Jambalaya #7 - Georgism and The Wealth of Cities https://joelanderson.substack.com/p/joels-jambalaya-7-georgism-and-the?utm_source=twitter&sd=nfs&s=r (author: Joel Anderson, Georgism)
INNOVATIVE METHODS OF FINANCING PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION https://www.globalurban.org/GUDMag06Vol2Iss1/Wetzel.htm (author: Dave Wetzel, land value uplift capture, public transportation, transit) Related: Wheels of Fortune book by Fred Harrison.
The Economics of Henry George: History's Rehabilitation of America's Greatest Early Economist (author: Philip J. Bryson). Related: The Economics of Henry George: A Review Essay by Polly Cleveland.
The Art of Community https://archive.org/details/artofcommunity00maccguat (Author: Spencer MacCallum, heterodox Georgist, proprietary communities, book, free online) Related : Introduction to Proprietary Cities, Fred Foldvary,
Introduction to Proprietary Cities https://fee.org/articles/introduction-to-proprietary-cities/ (Author: Mark Lutter, Charter Cities, Proprietary Communities, Georgist-related, Spencer MacCallum, Fred Foldvary, anthropology, article). related: The Art of Community
Two Little Tigers: Culture and Institutions in Dublin and Singapore with Lessons for the Charter Cities Movement https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/research/two-little-tigers-culture-and-institutions-in-dublin-and-singapore-with-lessons-for-the-charter-cities-movement/ (Charter Cities, Georgism, Ireland, Singapore, Dublin). Related: Anne Haila,
Henry George’s Legacy in Economic Thought (history of economic thought, evolutionary economics)
LAND & LIBERTY (Vol. 81 & 82) https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/archivelandliberty/Land+%26+Liberty+Magazine/Archive/1970s/Land+and+Liberty+1974-1975+-+81st+%26+82nd+Years/Land+and+Liberty+1974-1975+-+81st+%26+82nd+Years.pdf (archive, Georgism, magazine)
The Basic Insight: The Law of Rent https://www.henrygeorge.org/rent1.htm
Visualizing Earth Sharing https://web.archive.org/web/20160814234031/http://earthsharing.org/visualizing-earth-sharing/
Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing by Josh Ryan-Collins, Laurie Macfarlane, and Toby Lloyd (book, introductory)
How Land Disappeared from Economic Theory https://evonomics.com/josh-ryan-collins-land-economic-theory/ (author: Josh Ryan-Collins) The Taxation of Land Value https://www.elibrary.imf.org/configurable/content/journals$002f024$002f1967$002f001$002farticle-A004-en.xml?t:ac=journals%24002f024%24002f1967%24002f001%24002farticle-A004-en.xml (Case Studies, International Monetary Fund, paper, article, Land Value Tax) TAXATION OF ECONOMIC RENTS https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joes.12340 (Georgist-related, Land Value Tax, Answers to Critics) The Politics of Housing (author: Ben W. Ansell, Political Science, Henry George, Land is still Important), Related: Rognlie The Corruption of Economics (authors: Mason Gaffney, Fred Harrison, and Kris Feder, history, conflation of Land and Capital, neoclassical economics, neoclassical economists) The Menace of Privilege https://www.cooperative-individualism.org/george-jr-henry_menace-of-privilege-1905.pdf (author: Henry George Jr, introductory, privilege, inequality) Progress and Poverty Bob Drake abridgement https://www.henrygeorge.org/pcontents.htm (abridgement, abridged). Description: this is an edition of Progress and Poverty which simplifies and modernises the language without removing any of the substantive content. It is much shorter while being less flowery and “old-school” in style. Georgist Reading stuff/Your Google doc for your articles https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qHwlkIwDZTO-zu6brIPgW3ROwqQzJS-09S9xLJDZfVw/edit#heading=h.822ixd4to89i
In the Battle Over the Right to Repair, Open-Source Tractors Offer an Alternative https://civileats.com/2022/04/27/right-to-repair-open-source-tractors-john-deere-oggun-farms-profitability-technology/ (Georgist-related, open-source, localism, farming, farmer, agriculture, right to repair)
Land Reform, its Effects on the Rice Sector, and Economic Development: Empirical Case Study in Taiwan https://www.econ.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/Li%20Duan%20%281%29.pdf (author: Li Duan, Taiwan, land reform, development economics, efficiency, equity, agriculture, industrialization)
The land dividend https://centrethinktank.co.uk/2022/04/19/the-land-dividend/ (united kingdom, progressive, dividend, land value tax)
Minerals are a shared inheritance: Accounting for the resource curse https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/102270/1/MPRA_paper_102270.pdf (authors: Rahul Basu, Scott Pegg, resource curse, natural resources, Georgist)
The Future We Need https://basicincome.org/news/2019/09/the-future-we-need/ (author: Rahul Basu, UBI, dividend, Singapore, Sweden, Social Wealth Fund, Georgist author, Georgist, Norway, intergenerational equity) . Related: Lars' Substack article on Norway, Stephen Hoskins Substack article on Singapore, Dag Detter
The zero-rent society: Evidence from hydropower and petroleum windfalls in Norwegian local governments https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272722000524 (Norway, Resource Curse)
The Populist Vision (author: Charles Postel, history, single-tax, Rural, black, ADOS, african-american, populism, Populists, farmers, Georgist-related) Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866-1896 (author: Charles Postel, history, equality, single-tax, Rural, black, ADOS, african-american, Timothy Fortune, georgist-related)
The Property-Owning Democracy: Freedom and Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century (author: Gavin Kerr, social liberalism, classical liberalism, predistribution, property-owning democracy, left-libertarianism, Georgism)
HENRY GEORGE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THORSTEIN VEBLEN’S THEORY OF CAPITAL https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-history-of-economic-thought/article/abs/henry-george-and-the-development-of-thorstein-veblens-theory-of-capital/877838DD2363337F6E5F0564F216CC86 (author: NEIL B. NIMAN, history of economic thought, Thorstein Veblen, Henry George)
The Georgist Philosophy in Culture and History (author: Pat Aller, history)
The revival of cities and the urban land premium https://voxeu.org/article/city-revivals-and-urban-land-premiums (article) Cities and the Urban Land Premium (book)
-- Inequality in nature
Survival of the Richest Turfholders, not the Fittest Individuals https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6g4nrovd-tg (author: Polly Cleveland, evolution, inequality, ecology, nature, Georgism) Cooperation, Competition and Economic Rent: A Natural History Perspective https://www.mcleveland.org/working_papers/Cooperation_Competition_and_Economic_Rent.pdf (author: Polly Cleveland, evolution, inequality, ecology, nature, Georgism, cooperation, competition, economic rent) Inequality in nature and society https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29183971/ (Bas van Bavel, inequality, nature, ecology, nature, Georgist-related) The nature of privilege: intergenerational wealth in animal societies https://academic.oup.com/beheco/article/33/1/1/6454996?login=false (inequality, ecology, nature, Georgist-related)
The Forgotten Man: Henry George https://cooperative-individualism.org/geiger-george_the-forgotten-man-henry-george-1941-autumn.pdf (author: George R. Geiger) The Twice 'Forgotten' Man: Henry George-Some Aspects of His Thought in Relation to His Times and Our Own https://www.cooperative-individualism.org/bruchey-stuart_twice-forgotten-man-henry-george-1972-apr.htm (author: Stuart Weems Bruchey)
-- Twitter threads GonzoGeorgism proposed leasehold auction system https://twitter.com/GonzoGeorgism/status/1198270751159259136 (archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20220506013212/https://unrollthread.com/t/1198270751159259136/) (author: GonzoGeorgism, leasehold, auction, Georgist author, institutional design)
Videogame Eco and Georgist experimentation https://web.archive.org/web/20220707231530/https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1544498576344068097.html (twitter thread, digital real estate, Eco, videogame, Georgist)
Henry George's influence on Meiji Japanese liberals https://web.archive.org/web/20220713023928/https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1545523470137794561.html (author: Amanda Fugandkiss @ad_hominem_pro, Henry George, liberalism, Japan, Meiji Japan, Geoism, Itagaki Taisuke)
Reddit posts George's opinion on value and exchange value (author: Macaste, explanation, Henry George, subjectivism, Labor Theory of Value, exchange-value). Related: Kevin Carsons explanation of LTV? Need to look into this more
Georgist authors:
Matthew Downhour https://twitter.com/MatthewDownhour?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
An Objective Look at Land and Entropy https://schalkenbach.org/an-objective-look-at-land-and-entropy/ (Locke)
Lars Doucet https://www.fortressofdoors.com/
https://twitter.com/larsiusprime?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
Land value tax in online games and virtual worlds: A how-to guide https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/land-value-tax-in-online-games-and-virtual-worlds-a-how-to-guide (videogames, virtual economy, land value tax)
Roger Sandilands (economist, Scotland, Scottish) Natural Law and the Political Economy of Henry George https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241823400_Natural_Law_and_the_Political_Economy_of_Henry_George (Henry George, neoclassical economics)
Alex Armlovich Alex Armlovich talking about congestion pricing https://web.archive.org/web/20220703120421/https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1441044772903428097.html (congestion pricing, congestion fees, externalities, time tax, twitter thread)
Darren Iversen https://merionwest.com/author/darren-iversen/ https://twitter.com/IversenDarren
Fred Harrison (academic, economist) The Power In The Land https://www.cooperative-individualism.org/harrison-fred_the-power-in-the-land-1983.htm (introductory, book, free online) The Silver Bullet https://schalkenbach.org/pdf/TheSilverBullet.pdf (introductory, book, free online) Wheels of Fortune: https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/upldbook307pdf.pdf Self-funding Infrastructure and the Free Market Case for a Land Tax (infrastructure, land value uplift capture, Case Studies, Land Value Tax, book, Free online)
The Killing Fields (Documentary - Land Value Tax) (Fred Harrison, conservation, environmentalism, environmentalist, documentary, video, Land Value Tax)
Frank De Jong (former Green Party leader) Land Value Taxation and Agriculture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkXEM7fgGDc (video, agriculture, farming, farmer, sprawl, Land Value Tax, monoculture) Green Acres https://schalkenbach.org/green-acres/ (supply quotes, land value tax, article, agriculture, farming, farming)
Dr. Prasanna Kumar Mohanty (India, economist, civil servant) Will India Lead the Way in Urban Land Tax Reform? A Mission Director from the Indian Ministry of Housing Provides Some Answers https://www.huffpost.com/entry/will-india-lead-the-way-i_b_878077 (Scott Baker, interview, Huffpost) 1 page work biography of Dr.Mohanty https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/Content/PDFs/PDPM06022018F4B716E7E18943AB990576F3DD352309.PDF (work biography)
Kris Feder (academic, economist) Ed Dodson Martin Adams
Brendon Harre https://twitter.com/brendon_harre https://medium.com/land-buildings-identity-and-values
Caden Haustein https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/letter-from-a-young-distributist https://twitter.com/carmysilna
Land: A New Paradigm for a Thriving World (introductory)
Martin Adams Progress.org articles https://www.progress.org/authors/martin-adams BlueRepublik GEORGISM/LVT FAQ https://bluerepublik.wordpress.com/2020/04/28/georgism-lvt-faq/ (Arguments Against, Answers to Critics, FAQ, Land Value Tax). WELFARE ECONOMICS OF THE LAND VALUE TAX (Deadweight loss, Land Value Tax, explanatory)
Gavin R. Putland
Trickle-Up Economics Assessing the impact of privatized land rent on economic growth https://www.prosper.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/TrickleUp22.pdf (author: Gavin R. Putland, Prosper Australia, Australia)
Fred Foldvary (academic, economist, geoanarchist, austrian economics, libertarian, libertarianism)
Fred Foldvary (academic, geoanarchist, economist, libertarian, libertarianism, proprietary communities, austrian economist, Austrian economics) homepage https://web.archive.org/web/20210901105522/http://www.foldvary.net/ Proprietary Communities and Community Associations https://web.archive.org/web/20210714063855/http://www.foldvary.net/ec232/pgpc/pgpc08.pdf (proprietary communities). Related: Spencer MacCallum, Introduction to Proprietary Cities
Progress.org articles https://www.progress.org/authors/fred-foldvary
Jeffrey Johnson Smith,
Counting Bounty: The Quest to Know the Worth of Earth https://cooperative-individualism.org/smith-jeffrey_counting-bounty-2020.htm (author:Jeffrey Johnson Smith, Land is still important, estimating rent, free online). Related: Land is a Big Deal article, Cooperative-Individualism
Stephen Hoskins (economist, academic) (homepage https://stephenhoskins.notion.site/stephenhoskins/Stephen-Hoskins-Homepage-81e941eff0ad4c9696ced20d50935b91)
Terence Dwyer
The Taxable Capacity of Australian Land and Resources (author: Terence Dwyer, Land is still important, estimating rent, Australia). Related: Counting Bounty, Land is a big deal article
Mason Gaffney (academic, economist, small business). Homepage https://www.masongaffney.org/
CONTAINMENT POLICIES FOR URBAN SPRAWL https://www.masongaffney.org/publications/E3Containment_policies.CV.pdf (author: Mason Gaffney, sprawl)
The Philosophy of Public Finance https://cooperative-individualism.org/gaffney-mason_philosophy-of-public-finance-1998-jan.pdf (author:Mason Gaffney)
The Hidden Taxable Capacity of Land: Enough and to Spare https://economics.ucr.edu/papers/papers08/08-12old.pdf (author: Mason Gaffney, essential document, Land is still important, estimating rent)
Christopher England (academic, historian)
Land and Liberty: Henry George, the Single Tax Movement, and the Origins of 20th Century Liberalism PHD Dissertation https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/1029879/England_georgetown_0076D_13095.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y (essential document, history, Case Studies, Why Georgism faded, Henry George) Land Value Taxation in Vancouver: Rent-Seeking and the Tax Revolt https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ajes.12218 (rent-seeking, Special Interests, Henry George, history, Why Georgism faded, Case Studies) H. William Batt (former academic, economist)
Why Tax Land Value? http://sms.or.th/sms/images/pdf/Why%20Tax%20Land%20Value%20-%20Bill%20Batt.pdf (author:Bill Batt, Powerpoint)
Mary "Polly" Cleveland (academic, economist, small business) https://www.mcleveland.org/
ENVP U6250 Takeaway Points https://www.mcleveland.org/Class_notes/ENVP_U6250_Takeaway_Points.pdf (introductory)
Commons, Titles and Rent https://www.mcleveland.org/Class_notes/Commons_Titles_and_Rent.pdf (introductory)
Thomas Paine
Agrarian Justice (author: Thomas paine)
Thomas Spence
Georgist-related authors:
Cameron K.Murray We zoned for density and got higher house prices: Supply and price effects of upzoning over 20 years https://osf.io/zkt7v/ (zoning, upzoning, planning, house prices)
Jerusalem Demsas (journalist, YIMBY) Tax the land: One radical idea to solve America’s housing crisis https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22951092/land-tax-housing-crisis (land value tax, United States, Vox) The Real Villain in the Gentrification Story https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/gentrification-nimby-homeowners-affordable-housing/661288/ (YIMBY, NIMBY, Gentrification, The Atlantic)
Andy Wightman (Scotland, Scottish, politician) Land Matters: the blog and website of Andy Wightman https://andywightman.scot/
M. Nolan Gray (YIMBY, zoning, urbanism) Twitter https://twitter.com/mnolangray Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It (book, YIMBY, zoning, urbanism)
Cory Doctorow Competitive Compatibility: Let's Fix the Internet, Not the Tech Giants https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021/10/255710-competitive-compatibility/fulltext (adversarial interoperability, interoperability, competitive compatibility, Big Tech) How to design an anti-monopoly interop system https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/05/time-for-some-game-theory/#massholes (adversarial interoperability, interoperability, competitive compatibility, Big Tech)
HENRY GEORGE ACADEMY (articles, videos, books)
--
Arguments against/Answers to Critics
ARE LOCAL PROPERTY TAXES REGRESSIVE, PROGRESSIVE, OR WHAT? https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/NTJ44014529?journalCode=ntj (regressive, progressive, LVT, property tax)
Has anyone written a rebuttal of Paul Birch's critique of Georgism? https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/ml6nd9/has_anyone_written_a_rebuttal_of_paul_birchs/ (Paul Birch, reddit)
The problem with the "positive externality" argument against georgism https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/v7absg/the_problem_with_the_positive_externality/ (author: Macaste, reddit post, externalities, positive externality)
Restore the Original Wealth Tax http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2011/0311cleveland.html (author: Polly Cleveland, regressive, progressive, LVT, property tax)
Murray Rothbard's Facile Single-Tax Critique http://www.savingcommunities.org/docs/sullivan.dan/rothbardongeorge.shtml (libertarian, libertarianism, Rothbard, Saving Communities website, author: Dan Sullivan).
Rothbard v Georgism: Overview (Rothbard, libertarian, libertarianism) Taxation: The Lost History (author: Terence Dwyer, advanced, Land is still Important, Land and Improvements can’t be separated)
The Ultimate Tax Reform: Public Revenue from Land Rent (author:Fred Foldvary, paper, article)
--
Official land valuation page for Victoria, Australia https://www.land.vic.gov.au/valuations
--
Introductory
Lars' 4 articles https://gameofrent.com/content/progress-and-poverty-review
Why I like Land Value Tax https://stephenhoskins.notion.site/Why-I-like-Land-Value-Tax-5185b25cc87e478f92662e895680ad4e (author: Stephen Hoskins, land value tax)
ECONOMICS AND THE ROOTS OF DYSFUNCTION https://staneb.com/the-dysfunction-of-economics/
What is Georgism?
Explain like I'm five
What is Georgism? Please do an ELI5 https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/iyjy0i/what_is_georgism_please_do_an_eli5/ (reddit)
Could somebody please explain to me the basics of Georgism and how it would stop landlords? I honestly don’t really get it? (reddit, green_meklar) Quote:
What is Georgism? https://www.smartcapitalmind.com/what-is-georgism.htm (author: Brendan McGuigan)
How about videos? (video, videos)
Common Ground OR-WA Videos https://commongroundorwa.org/homepage/featured-videos/ (youtube, Common Ground, Common Ground OR-WA)
For the Land is Mine | Georgism Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHwFyXDx2_U (documentary, Georgism, Land Value Tax, Charles Ashira, Youtube)
Can I get something a bit more in depth? Henry George's book 'Progress and Poverty' is a great read in itself. There is also an abridged version by Bob Drake which keeps all the substantive content while greatly simplifying and shortening the 19th century writing style (link to mention lower down)
Book Review of Progress and Poverty Explains it very well. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progress-and-poverty
Annotated Progress and Poverty http://menaceofprivilege.com/synopsis-of-progress-poverty/
39 page synopsis: http://progpov.menaceofprivilege.com/notes_with_intro.pdf
Correcting George's error in P&P https://old.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/870eyr/correcting_georges_single_error_in_progress_and/ (reddit, Henry George's errors)
Can I hear a long form podcast? (podcasts) Audio format from the Renegade Economist https://www.mixcloud.com/RenegadeEconomists/the-hope-behind-band-aids-a-special-on-henry-george/ Explains the core argument why it's the solution - doesn't flesh out why Rent would be sufficient but very good otherwise. https://www.prosper.org.au/tag/georgist-podcourse/ That was all too many words. How about a nice, simple, colorful picture? Here ya go.
as of 2018 hosted on this site: http://www.c4ej.com/ http://www.c4ej.com/Home/DRvg238XcAA7Kw_.jpg?attredirects=0 https://sites.google.com/site/coalitionforeconomicjustice/Home/DRvg238XcAA7Kw_.jpg?attredirects=1
See also Visualizing Earth Sharing
https://web.archive.org/web/20190306034814/http://earthsharing.org/visualizing-earth-sharing/
Must-reads
Lars' 3 articles
Christopher England Thesis
Best of , “if you wanna learn about x topic what are the best topics you should read?”
Christopher England Thesis
Lars' 3 articles
Georgist video channels
Nikolaj And Simon Talks https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmMd4bFn_1k0JjvOCijTB7A/about (Youtube channel, Georgist, video, introductory) Geophilos https://www.youtube.com/c/geophilos/featured (Fred Harrison) Share the Rents https://www.youtube.com/user/sharetherents/featured Council of Georgist Organizations https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2BQTLdOvkuMVmVGI2pT1dg Edward Dodson https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZ7RoplsFTXuE8o4jOb2kdA Libertarianism, libertarian
LincolnLandPolicy https://www.youtube.com/user/LincolnLandPolicy/featured (Lincoln Land Institute)
-- Georgist information/resource compilation websites
Earthsharing.org https://web.archive.org/web/20190517114557/https://earthsharing.org/ (environmentalism)
Georgist Journal https://georgistjournal.org/
Progress.org https://www.progress.org/ (Floyd Marinescu, Olivia Jol, georgist authors)
Cooperative-individualism https://cooperative-individualism.org/principles.htm (articles, free books, history, history of Georgism, Georgist archive) Description: Massive archive of past and present Georgist writing.
Wealth and Want http://www.wealthandwant.com/ (articles, quotes) Description: large collection of Georgist writings organized by category
The American Journal of Economics and Sociology https://www.jstor.org/journal/amerjeconsoci (academic journal, Georgist)
r/Georgism index/resources https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/wiki/index (reddit) r/Georgism reading list https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/wiki/readinglist (reddit)
Stephen Hoskins website https://stephenhoskins.notion.site/stephenhoskins/Stephen-Hoskins-Homepage-81e941eff0ad4c9696ced20d50935b91 (Stephen Hoskins, Capitalization of land/property prices, land value assessment, Incentive effects of land taxes for optimal governance, YIMBY)
http://savingcommunities.org/ (Dan Sullivan, articles) https://georgistjournal.org/ (articles) https://schalkenbach.org/ HENRY GEORGE’S WORKS https://schalkenbach.org/henry-georges-works/ (author: Henry George, articles, books, speeches, translations, free online) Works by Other Authors https://schalkenbach.org/works-by-other-authors/ (books, articles, free online) https://henrygeorge.org/bob/ Henry George Institute Lessons and Readings https://henrygeorge.org/bob/lessons-readings/ (articles, videos, introductory) Land Value Tax Campaign https://www.landvaluetax.org/ (articles, Answers to Critics) Land Values Research Group http://blog.lvrg.org.au/2009/01/about-us.html (blog, Australia, Bryan Kavanaugh)
(taken from LVT Policy Guide Google doc)
Sample LVT Enabling Legislation.
Maryland Enabling Legislation 2006 : https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2006rs/bills_noln/hb/fhb1552.pdf Maryland AG Opinion (1995) https://www.marylandattorneygeneral.gov/Opinions%20Documents/1995/80oag316.pdf Virginia Local Option for Cities 2000-2020: https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title58.1/chapter32/section58.1-3221.1/ NY Enabling https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/RPT/907
Lit Review Mathur “Value Capture to Fund Public Transportation: The Impact of Warm Springs BART Station on the Value of Neighboring Residential Properties in Fremont, CA” https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/mti_publications/265/
https://commonground-usa.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Land-Value-Tax-Analysis-final-report.pdf
https://commonground-usa.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Municipal-Land-Trust-final-report.pdf Financing Public Capital through Land Rent Taxation https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/77659/1/cesifo_wp4280.pdf
Arnott, Stiglitz - Aggregate Land Rents, Expenditure on Public Gods, and Optimal City Size https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D8086FW3/download
The Impact of the Jubilee Line Extension of the London Underground Rail Network on Land Values https://www.lincolninst.edu/sites/default/files/pubfiles/906_vickers_complete_pdf.pdf
CROSSRAIL PROJECT: FINANCE, FUNDING AND VALUE CAPTURE FOR LONDON’S ELIZABETH LINE https://learninglegacy.crossrail.co.uk/documents/financeandfunding/
--
Podcasts
The Most Popular Economist: Henry George https://www.libertarianism.org/podcasts/portraits-liberty/most-popular-economist-henry-george (Henry George, podcast, biography, libertarianism)
--
Georgist-Related
Strong Towns (organization)
Strong Towns: Property Tax vs. Land Value "Tax" (LVT) https://youtu.be/ok2uR3btMrE (video, introductory)
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins
The Long-run Development Impacts of Agricultural: Productivity Gains: Evidence from Irrigation Canals in India∗ https://shrug-assets-ddl.s3.amazonaws.com/static/main/assets/other/acgn-canals.pdf (India, Canals, Irrigation, Agriculture, development, ATCOR, STCOR)
The Blue Roof (Korea, real estate, politics) TBR Weekly Update: Week 4, March 2022 https://www.blueroofpolitics.com/post/tbr-weekly-update-week-4-march-2022/ Defusing the South Korea’s Jeonse Time Bomb https://www.blueroofpolitics.com/post/subprime-on-blockchain-defusing-the-south-koreas-i-jeonse-i-time-bomb/ It’s the Real Estate, Stupid: the Moon Jae-in Administration at the Crossroads https://www.blueroofpolitics.com/post/its-the-real-estate-stupid-the-moon-jae-in-administration-at-the-crossroads/ Presidential Election Reax: How Yoon Seok-yeol Won https://www.blueroofpolitics.com/post/presidential-election-reax-the-real-estate-election/ Real Estate Taxes Blues Played on the World's Tiniest Violin https://www.blueroofpolitics.com/post/real-estate-taxes-blues-played-on-the-worlds-tiniest-violin/
The Openness-Equality Trade-Off in Global Redistribution https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2509305 (author: E. Glen Weyl, open borders, equality, inequality)
Chapter 33 of Capital vol 1 (Marx, Marxism, settler colonialism,).
How some big grocery chains help ensure that food deserts stay barren https://thecounter.org/supermarket-chains-poor-communities-lease-agreements-food-insecurity/ (restrictive covenants, competition, anti-competitive). Related: Mason Gaffney on restrictive covenants.
Winner Takes (Almost) All: How WIC Affects the Infant Formula Market https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2011/september/infant-formula-market/ The Infant Formula Market: Consequences of a Change in the WIC Contract Brand https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details/?pubid=44902 The WIC brand of infant formula varies by State https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=78481
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/property-prices/nyc/?sref=lEMliCi4
Public Housing For All https://www.noemamag.com/public-housing-for-all/ (author: Paul Williams, public housing, market socialism, Alaska Permanent Fund)
Shut Out: How a Housing Shortage Caused the Great Recession and Crippled Our Economy (author: Kevin Erdmann, housing bubble)
Free Movement, Open Borders, and the Global Gains from Labor Mobility https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-economics-080218-025843 (open borders)
Parking kills businesses, not bikes or buses https://www.newsroom.co.nz/ideasroom/parking-kills-businesses-not-bikes-or-buses (parking)
Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire The Political Economy of British Imperialism, 1860–1912 (Georgist-related, imperialism, colonialism, rent-seeking)
Dag Detter (Land is Still Important, Singapore, Sweden) https://twitter.com/dagdetter https://detterco.com/ The Public Wealth of Cities: How to Unlock Hidden Assets to Boost Growth and Prosperity The Public Wealth of Nations: How Management of Public Assets Can Boost or Bust Economic Growth
Canadian Cities Have Seen Up To 90% of New Real Estate Supply Scooped By Investors https://betterdwelling.com/canadian-cities-have-seen-up-to-90-of-new-real-estate-supply-scooped-by-investors/ (Canada, real estate)
A Conceptual History of Equal Opportunity: Debating the limits of acceptable inequality in U.S. history https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/61910/Iluzzi_Michael%20August%202008.pdf?sequence=1 (PHD Thesis, Equality of Opportunity, Single-Taxers, United States, history, conceptual history)
Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (anti-Georgist, Georgist-related) Lessons from Attempted Utopia Fairhope, Alabama, and Arden, Deleware https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/working-papers/lessons-attempted-utopia (Fairhope, Arden, Community Land Trust, Proprietary Community)
History of Economic Thought website https://www.hetwebsite.net/het/home.htm (History of Economic Thought) [note that each page has many links that should themselves be added to this repository Thomas Spence https://www.hetwebsite.net/het/profiles/tspence.htm Henry George https://www.hetwebsite.net/het/profiles/george.htm
Shenzhen’s Urban Villages: Surviving Three Decades of Economic Reform and Urban Expansion https://realkm.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Shenzhens_Urban_Villages.pdf (author: Da Wei David Wang. PHD Thesis, China, Geoist Case studies, Chinese Urban Villages, Citizens Dividend, Geoist case studies, Shenzhen)
Urban Villages in the New China: Case of Shenzhen (author: Da Wei David Wang. book, China, Geoist Case studies, Chinese Urban Villages, Citizens Dividend, Geoist case studies, Shenzhen)
Guangdong: collective land ownership and the making of a new middle class https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2012/05/18/guangdong-collective-land-ownership-and-the-making-of-a-new-middle-class/ (author: Jonathan Unger, Guangdong, China, Chinese Urban Villages, Citizens Dividend, Geoist case studies, article)
The Community-Based Partnership Approach for Affordable Housing Development: A Case in Shenzhen, China https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/54205/567654720-MIT.pdf?sequence=2 (author: Feifei Zhao, Masters Thesis, Affordable Housing, community, China, Chinese Urban Villages, Citizens Dividend, Geoist case studies, Shenzhen)
URBANIZATION AS STATE-BUILDING: A CASE STUDY OF GOVERNANCE REFORM IN THE GUANGZHOU LUOGANG DISTRICT, CHINA https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0165669 (author: SIU WAI WONG, PHD Thesis, China, Geoist Case studies, Chinese Urban Villages, Citizens Dividend, Geoist case studies, Guangzhou Luogang)
Chinese Small Property: The Co-Evolution of Law and Social Norms (author: Shitong Qiao, China, Law, Anarchism, property rights, Geoist case studies, Citizens Dividend, book, Chinese Urban Villages, informal property rights)
Chinese Small Property: The Co-Evolution of Law and Social Norms https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/sites/default/files/download/Qiao-The%20Co-Evolution%20of%20Property%20Law%20and%20Norms_2.pdf (author: Shitong Qiao, China, Law, Anarchism, property rights, informal property rights, Geoist case studies, Citizens Dividend, PHD Thesis, Chinese Urban Villages)
FRAGMENTED LAWS, CONTINGENT CHOICES: THE TRAGICOMEDY OF THE VILLAGE COMMONS IN CHINA https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1541&context=djcil (author: Shitong Qiao, China, Geoist Case studies, Chinese Urban Villages, Citizens Dividend, Geoist case studies)
A $30 Billion Fortune Is Hiding in China’s Silicon Valley https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-18/inside-china-s-silicon-valley-villagers-go-from-rags-to-real-estate-riches (China, Geoist Case studies, Chinese Urban Villages, article, Citizens Dividend, Geoist case studies)
The Guangdong Model of Urbanisation: Collective village land and the making of a new middle class https://psc.bellschool.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/IPS/PSC/CCC/publications/papers/Chung_Unger_China_Perspectives-paper.pdf (Guangdong, China, Geoist Case studies, Chinese Urban Villages, article, Citizens Dividend, Geoist case studies)
A Weapon of the Weak? Shareholding, Property Rights and Villager Empowerment in China https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/china-quarterly/article/weapon-of-the-weak-shareholding-property-rights-and-villager-empowerment-in-china/50968881F1316CBAEDF9D7B5DA88350D (author: Karita Kan, China, Geoist Case studies, Chinese Urban Villages, article, Citizens Dividend, Geoist case studies, property rights)
Understanding the Unique Spatial Relations and Power Dynamics of China’s Urban Villages https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1081&context=dujpew (author: Kaitlyn Zhao, China, Geoist Case studies, Chinese Urban Villages, article, Citizens Dividend, Geoist case studies)
“Not Rural but Not Urban”: Community Governance in China's Urban Villages https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/china-quarterly/article/abs/not-rural-but-not-urban-community-governance-in-chinas-urban-villages/5A7006FE5A9BC4E4215B8B899334E7F4 (China, Geoist Case studies, Chinese Urban Villages, article, Citizens Dividend, Geoist case studies, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Shenyang)
“Villages” in Shenzhen: Persistence and Transformation of an Old Social System in an Emerging Mega City https://d-nb.info/1115337211/34 (Shenzhen, PHD Thesis, China, Geoist Case studies, Chinese Urban Villages, article, Citizens Dividend, Geoist case studies)
Beyond Classification https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/urban-village/169804/beyond-classification/ (author: Juan Du, Shenzhen, China, Geoist Case studies, Chinese Urban Villages, article, Citizens Dividend, Geoist case studies)
What really powers innovation: high wages (economic history, innovation, industrial revolution)
The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment. (physiocrats, physiocracy, history of economic thought)
The Economic Turn: Recasting Political Economy in Enlightenment Europe (physiocrats, physiocracy, history of economic thought)
Handbook of the History of Economic Thought: Insights on the Founders of Modern Economics https://competitionandappropriation.econ.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/95/2017/08/HandbookHistoryThought.pdf (Mercantilism, Camerialism, Physiocracy, physiocrats, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Leon Walras, Alfred Marshall, history of economic thought).
The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/end-ownership (property rights, Intellectual Property, Copyright, Patent, digital, Law)
Cuida Carros and the Emergence of Informal Parking Markets in Guatemala City https://jihu.ufm.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Hall.Katarina.cdl_.3.pdf (authors: Nolan Gray, Katarina Hall, Donald Shoup, parking, Guatemala, congestion)
Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour https://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/368/368lewistable.pdf (author: Sir William Arthur Lewis, development economics, release date: 1954, classical economics)
The Economics of International Wage Differentials and Migration https://oxfordre.com/economics/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190625979.001.0001/acrefore-9780190625979-e-353 (authors: Lant Pritchett, Farah Hanilabor mobility, open borders, place premium, international migration)
6 Tax Breaks Landlords Get that Hurt the Economy and You https://johnwake.substack.com/p/6-tax-breaks-landlords-get-that-hurt?s=w (author: John Wake, tax breaks, subsidies)
Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (author Eric Foner, history, Henry George)
To Promote Competition, Deregulate https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/biden-competition-order-needs-deregulation-by-anne-o-krueger-2021-07?utm_source=Project%20Syndicate%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=ba13da9498-covid_newsletter_07_29_2021&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_73bad5b7d8-ba13da9498-105576337&mc_cid=ba13da9498&mc_eid=687ec9272c (Jones Act, Deregulation)
An Economic Analysis of the Jones Act https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/mercatus-grennes-jones-act-v2.pdf (Jones Act, Deregulation)
Russian Oil Is Off the Table but the Jones Act Serves as a Barrier to Using Domestic Supplies https://www.cato.org/blog/russian-oil-table-jones-act-serves-barrier-using-domestic-supplies (Jones Act, Deregulation, Oil)
How Much Oil Does the U.S. Import From Russia and Why Did Biden Ban It? https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-does-the-u-s-still-buy-russian-oil-11646151935 (Jones Act, Deregulation, Oil)
Double Dividend: Environmental Taxes and Fiscal Reform in the United States https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/double-dividend (Green tax shift, environmentalism, book)
The Influence of Urban Areas on Farmland Values https://www.choicesmagazine.org/choices-magazine/theme-articles/farmland-values/the-influence-of-urban-areas-on-farmland-values (land value, farmland, urban land)
How Apartment Bans Keep Americans in the Poor House https://cayimby.org/how-apartment-bans-keep-americans-in-the-poor-house/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Twitter&utm_campaign=Twitter
Rent-tax substitution and its impact on firms: Evidence from housing purchase limits policy in China https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0166046222000448 (anti-Georgist policy, China)
Land management can contribute to net zero https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo0613?cookieSet=1 (carbon markets, climate change)
The Emergence of Musical Copyright in Europe From 1709 to 1850 https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/emergence-musical-copyright-europe-1709-1850 (copyright, music, history)
The Hated Property Tax: Salience, Tax Rates, and Tax Revolts https://www.nber.org/papers/w18514 (NBER, property tax, tax revolts)
How To Handle Real Estate With A Social Wealth Fund https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2018/01/26/how-to-handle-real-estate-with-a-social-wealth-fund/ (author: Matt Bruenig, market socialism, geosocialism, REIT, social wealth fund, racial wealth gap)
Can the land tax help curb urban sprawl? Evidence from growth patterns in Pennsylvania https://www.tagesspiegel.de/downloads/12984964/2/can-the-land-tax-help-curb-urban-sprawl.pdf (split-rate tax, property tax, United States, Pennsylvania, sprawl)
Canada Funnels The Largest Share of Investment Into Housing In The OECD https://betterdwelling.com/canada-funnels-the-largest-share-of-investment-into-housing-in-the-oecd/ (Canada)
Immigration and Housing Rents in American Cities https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1012&context=real-estate_papers (immigration, housing rents, United States, housing prices)
Advance land acquisition by local governments; benefit-cost analysis as an aid to policy https://ia800501.us.archive.org/23/items/advancelandacqui00shou/advancelandacqui00shou.pdf (authors: Donald Shoup, Ruth Mack, local government, land acquisition, United States)
(Re)Imagining Liberty Podcast https://www.reimaginingliberty.com/ (Aaron Ross Powell, left-libertarianism, libertarianism, podcast)
South Korea: Why is Seoul's population declining? https://www.dw.com/en/south-korea-why-is-seouls-population-declining/a-62138302 (South Korea, Seoul, housing prices, population decline)
Growth Effects of Sports Franchises, Stadiums, and Arenas: 15 Years Later https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/Coates-Sports-Franchises.pdf (subsidies, land values, property values, economic impact, sports, sports economics, stadium, arena, sports franchise, sports league)
The Impact of Professional Sports Franchises and Venues on Local Economies: A Comprehensive Survey https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4022547 (subsidies, land values, property values, economic impact, sports, sports economics, stadium, arena, sports franchise, sports league)
Does Hosting a Professional Sports Team Benefit the Local Community? Evidence From Property Assessments https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3855087 (subsidies, land values, property values, economic impact, sports, sports economics, stadium, arena, sports franchise, sports league)
Tax Schemes for Sports Venues https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3173824 (subsidies, land values, property values, property tax, tax subsidies, economic impact, sports, sports economics, stadium, arena, sports franchise, sports league)
Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4124698 (authors: Arpit Gupta, Vrinda Mittal, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, remote work, covid-19, office valuation, commercial real estate, real estate, land values, property values,)
A Cross-Ideological Case for Ending Exclusionary Zoning (author: Ilya Somin, YIMBY, Reason mag)
Equitable Interoperability: the “Super Tool” of Digital Platform Governance https://tobin.yale.edu/sites/default/files/Digital%20Regulation%20Project%20Papers/Digital%20Regulation%20Project%20-%20Equitable%20Interoperability%20-%20Discussion%20Paper%20No%204.pdf (adversarial interoperability, competitive compatibility, Platforms, Digital)
Agricultural Land Redistribution : Toward Greater Consensus https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/2653/488960PUB0REPLACEMENT0FILE09780821376270.pdf (land redistribution, land reform, world bank, land tax, agriculture)
The inverse relationship of farm size and productivity https://growthecon.com/blog/IFSP/ (author: Dietrich E. Vollrath, literature review, inverse farm-size productivity relationship)
Reforming the tax on immovable property https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/9789264254053-5-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/9789264254053-5-en (book chapter, OECD, property tax, fiscal federalism)
The Economics of Community Amenity Contributions and Real Estate Taxes https://engage.gov.bc.ca/app/uploads/sites/121/2021/06/Economics-of-CACs.pdf (literature review, British Columbia, Canada, government report)
Land value taxation and financing public infrastructure with land value capture https://trepo.tuni.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/101151/GRADU-1495180546.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y (author: Anna Kaipanen, land value tax, land value uplift capture)
Implementing a land value tax: considerations on moving from theory to practice https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/88754/1/Implementing%20a%20land%20value%20tax%20%20REVISION%20-%203-12-19%20-%20CENTAUR.pdf ( land value taxation, tax design; unimproved land value)
Can land taxes foster sustainable development? An assessment of fiscal, distributional and implementation issues https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837717310360 (land value tax, developing countries)
Land Taxes and Revenue Needs as Communities Grow and Decline: Evidence from New Zealand https://motu-www.motu.org.nz/wpapers/04_01.pdf (New Zealand, land value tax)
Land Value Taxation: A Critique of 'Tax Reform, A Rational Solution' https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4737415_Land_Value_Taxation_A_Critique_of_'Tax_Reform_A_Rational_Solution' (author: Julie P. Smith, land value tax, special interests, anti-georgist)
Land Value Taxation And Development Activity: The Reaction of Toronto and Ottawa Developers, Planners, and Municipal Finance Officials* https://idjs.ca/images/rcsr/archives/V20N3-Skaburskis-Tomalty.pdf (Toronto, Ottawa, Canada, anti-georgist, land value tax)
How to Reform the Property Tax: Lessons from around the World https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/imfg/uploads/325/1710_imfg_no.21_online_sept17.pdf (property tax, tax reform, local finance)
What drove the profitability of colonial firms? Labour coercion and trade preferences on the Sena Sugar Estates (1920–74) https://www.wider.unu.edu/sites/default/files/Publications/Working-paper/PDF/wp2022-70-what-drove-profitability-colonial-firms-labour-coercion-trade-preferences.pdf (Portugal, Africa, colonialism, colonial era, history, Mozambique, sugar, forced labor, trade preferences, productivity, rents, head taxes, tariff rate quotas, guaranteed prices)
The Geography of Inequality: How Land Use Regulation Produces Segregation https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/abs/geography-of-inequality-how-land-use-regulation-produces-segregation/BAB4ABDF014670550615CE670FF66016 (author: JESSICA TROUNSTINE, land use, regulation, segregation, geography, inequality)
MEASURING THE UNEQUAL GAINS FROM TRADE https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w20331/w20331.pdf (NBER, trade, Benefit the poor)
The incidence of transaction taxes: Evidence from a stamp duty holiday https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047272714001601 (Transaction taxes, capitalization, stamp duty, tax holiday, United Kingdom)
Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk? https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.25.3.83 (author: Michael A. Clemens, open borders, migration, immigration, deadweight loss)
Farms Under Threat 2040: Choosing an Abundant Future https://farmlandinfo.org/publications/farms-under-threat-2040/ (sprawl, farmland, farms, United States)
Skyscrapers and land values: Evidence from Chicago on the costs of building tall cities https://voxeu.org/article/tall-buildings-and-land-values (authors: Gabriel Ahlfeldt, Daniel McMillen, skyscrapers, land values, tall buildings, construction, housing, Chicago, urban economics, margin of production, extending the margin of production)
A NATION OF GAMBLERS: REAL ESTATE SPECULATION AND AMERICAN HISTORY https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18825/w18825.pdf (author: Edward L. Glaeser, NBER, land speculation, boom and bust cycles, United States, economic history)
How Technological Progress and Government Programs Influence Agricultural Land Values https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/309521/?ln=en (author: Robbin Shoemaker, technology, acreage reduction programs, land values, agriculture, United States)
The Privilege of Liberty: Challenging the Society of Orders https://quod.lib.umich.edu/w/wsfh/0642292.0035.011/--privilege-of-liberty-challenging-the-society-of-orders?rgn=main;view=fulltext (author: Jeff Horn, privilege, France, Ancien Regime)
The Impact of School Facility Investments on Students and Homeowners: Evidence from Los Angeles https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20200467 (author: Julien Lafortune, David Schönholzer, capitalization, schools, United States, Los Angeles, homeowners)
Land and Racial Wealth Inequality https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/bitstream/handle/10919/80469/MillerMClandandracialwealth.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y (author: Melinda C. Miller, inequality, racial wealth gap, ADOS, free land, black, United States, Reconstruction, history, economic history)
The One Thing Needful: Free Land and Black Mobility, 1880-1900 https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Workshops-Seminars/Economic-History/miller-111115.pdf (author: Melinda C. Miller, inequality, racial wealth gap, ADOS, free land, black, United States, Reconstruction, history, economic history)
Does Equality Persist? Evidence from the Homestead Act https://www.briankogelmann.com/uploads/5/5/8/6/55864067/does_equality_persist_website_version.pdf (author: Bryan Leonard, Brian Kogelmann, inequality, equality, Homestead Act, United States, free land, Henry George was right, Insufficiency of Remedies Currently Advocated, homesteading)
Problematic Private Property: The Case of New York Taxicab Medallions https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/72838661.pdf (author: Katrina Miriam Wymant, property rights, inefficiency, taxi medallion, United States, New York, privilege)
Incentives and Disincentives: The Potential of Property Taxes to Support Public Policy Objectives https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08111470500135177 (author: Phil Day, property tax, land value tax, betterment levy, Australia)
THE TIME TAX: Why is so much American bureaucracy left to average citizens?https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/07/how-government-learned-waste-your-time-tax/619568/ (author: Annie Lowrey, time tax, nonstandard taxes, tolls on production)
A LAND VALUE TAX FOR SCOTLAND: A report prepared by Andy Wightman for the Green MSPs in the Scottish Parliament http://www.andywightman.com/docs/LVTREPORT.pdf
Cosmos + Taxis https://cosmosandtaxis.org/ (urbanism, complexity science, complexity theory, classical liberalism, free-market liberalism, emergent order, articles)
COSMOS + TAXIS | Volume 8 Issue 8+9 2020 https://cosmosandtaxis.files.wordpress.com/2020/09/ct_conference_vol8_issue_8_9.pdf (Cosmos + Taxis, Henry George, Georgism, Jane Jacobs, Fred Foldvary, cellular democracy)
Strategic Learning and Corporate Investment https://conference.nber.org/conf_papers/f165385.pdf ( Real options, corporate investment, strategic interactions, peer learning, historical data, externalities, spillovers, internalization of externalities) Description: "Common ownership is particularly beneficial in land ownership given the prevalence of public goods and spatial spillovers internalized by the common owner. One example here: more concentrated land ownership facilitates coordination for oil and gas drillers enabling investment." https://web.archive.org/web/20220713013633/https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1546848924396392453.html
MapLab: The High Cost of Wide Streets: A new analysis finds that streets take up about 18% of urban space in major U.S. counties. That’s $959 billion worth of land. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-06-02/maplab-could-wide-streets-be-used-for-housing (author: Laura Bliss, Bloomberg, Suppressed Rents, land area, land value, right-of-way, streets, United States, urbanism)
WHY HAS REGIONAL INCOME CONVERGENCE DECLINED? https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/wp21_ganong-shoag_final.pdf (United States, labor mobility, migration, land use regulation, housing regulation, housing prices, inequality, interregional convergence)
Moving From Opportunity: The High Cost of Restrictions on Land Use https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/06/the-disconnet-between-wages-and-house-prices.html (author: Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution blog, blogpost, land use regulations, labor mobility, migration, housing prices, human assets, education, articles)
Implications of a Land Value Tax with Error in Assessed Values https://www.researchgate.net/publication/46552328_Implications_of_a_Land_Value_Tax_with_Error_in_Assessed_Values (Answers to Critics, Land Value Tax, land assessment, property assessment)
Resource Mobilization Through Property Tax Reforms: with a focus on assessment of current practices and scope for reforms for increase in revenue generation in ULB's of Maharashtra https://www.aiilsg.org/pdf/Research-Study_Property-Tax-Reforms_RCUES-of-AIILSG-Mumbai_FY2019-20.pdf (Dr. Prasanna Kumar Mohanty, property tax, Maharashtra, India, report, land value tax, Urban Local Bodies, Property tax reforms, Bangalore, Patna)
Liberal History: The website of the Liberal Democrat History Group https://liberalhistory.org.uk/ (history, liberalism, United Kingdom, Liberal Democrats, Liberal Party, SDP, information/resource compilation website)
The Lloyd George Land Taxes https://liberalhistory.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/73_Douglas_Lloyd_George_land_taxes.pdf (history, United Kingdom, Lloyd George, Henry George, Georgism, Land Value Tax, 1909 Budget)
Why Louisiana Stays Poor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWTic9btP38 (Louisiana, United States, poverty, property tax, tax exemption, subsidies, corporate subsidies)
Homelessness Is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/ (housing, homelessness, book)
THE HOUSING BUBBLE BABY BOOM: Spiralling UK house prices mean homeowners have more kids, but renters postpone starting families https://www.res.org.uk/resources-page/the-housing-bubble-baby-boom--spiralling-uk-house-prices-mean-homeowners-have-more-kids--but-renters-postpone-starting-families.html (housing, United Kingdom, study, baby boom, fertility)
Explaining Informal Taxation and Revenue Generation: Evidence from south-central Somalia https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/bitstream/handle/20.500.12413/16466/ICTD_WP118.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y (Somalia, taxation, taxes on production, informal taxation, informal revenue generation, equity, public goods provision)
Do Strict Land Use Regulations Make Metropolitan Areas More Segregated by Income? https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01944363.2015.1111163?journalCode=rjpa20 (segregation, income segregation, land use regulations, zoning, exclusionary zoning, United States, metropolitan areas)
The Impact of Land Use Regulation on Racial Segregation: Evidence from Massachusetts Zoning Borders https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/resseger/files/resseger_jmp_11_25.pdf (author: Matthew Resseger, United States, Massachusetts, segregation, racial segregation, land use regulations, Boston, Houston)
The Worst of All Worlds: Los Angeles, California, and the Emerging Reality of Dense Sprawl https://trid.trb.org/view/767192 (author: Eric Eidlin, California, Los Angeles, sprawl, density, dense sprawl, United States)
14 Percent of Los Angeles County Land is Dedicated to Parking https://la.curbed.com/2015/11/30/9895842/how-much-parking-los-angeles (author:Jeff Wattenhofer, United States, Los Angeles, parking)
Land Tenure and Property Rights in Pakistan: LTPR Issues And Support For The Taliban https://land-links.org/issue-brief/land-tenure-and-property-rights-in-pakistan/ (land tenure, Taliban, Pakistan)
AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF THE ECONOMICS OF COPYRIGHT: HOW VALID ARE THE RESULTS OF STUDIES IN DEVELOPED COUNTRIES FOR DEVELOPING COUNTRIES? https://www.wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/en/wipo_pub_1012-chapter3.pdf (developed countries, developing countries, Intellectual Property, Copyright, literature review)
History, Institutions, and Economic Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India https://pages.nyu.edu/debraj/Courses/Readings/BanerjeeIyer.pdf (India, land tenure, colonialism, Answers to Critics, British Raj land tax)